There have been so many recent advocates for Atlantic history that David Armitage has declared us all to be Atlanticists now.1 While conceding Armitage’s point that the subject of Atlantic history has become fashionable, and while saluting his effort to define a British Atlantic, there is such limited agreement over what the subject entails that it might be said that there are as many varieties of Atlantic history as there are Atlanticists.2 This chapter seeks to bring clarity to the study of the subject in three ways. First, it provides a taxonomy of six prescriptions that have been advanced by various practitioners of Atlantic history so that the strengths and shortcomings of each can be considered; second, it discusses two books which, each in its own way, challenge the legitimacy or importance of Atlantic history; and third, it offers some counters to these challenges and justifies the continued study of Atlantic history once it has been clearly distinguished from global history.
First among those who have come to be considered Atlantic historians have been specialists of early modern Europe who study what was once called the history of European overseas expansion in a comparative context. They have favored comparisons between the endeavors of England and Spain in the Atlantic or between the achievements of England and France in North America (but strangely only occasionally in the Caribbean), but also recently have given some attention to comparisons between the attainments of the English and the Dutch in the New World. When it comes to the eighteenth century, the activities of the Portuguese in Africa and America are sometimes also drawn into such comparisons. The issues that principally concern these scholars are cultural encounters between the extraordinary range of peoples who were brought into contact or conflict with one another in the Atlantic basin, principally through the agency of Europeans, over the course of the early modern centuries; Europeans’ promotion of new economic interests in the Atlantic; and different European groups’ efforts to monopolize trade in certain areas and commodities and to command the labor of other peoples. These historians are particularly interested in how Europeans created societies and polities de novo in distant places or fashioned them out of what remained of those indigenous societies which Europeans had made subservient to their interests.3 The work of these authors has aroused considerable interest among students of literature, who, in turn, have persuaded several historians to include within their purview the analysis of literary texts—both those composed in a colonial context and those written by European authors who may have had no direct experience of overseas voyaging.4
Those in category two are scholars interested in the comparative study of migrations across the Atlantic from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, with attention sometimes being given to the comparative study of the social configurations that resulted from these various migration streams. These scholars are mostly historians, but their empirical investigations have attracted increasing attention from social theorists who deploy historical evidence to enable generalizations about the phenomenon of human migration. One merit of this work, which justifies the appellation Atlantic, is that it links European with American and with African experiences, usually from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, and, in doing so, it draws a clear distinction between slave migrations and voluntary free migrations. Also, insofar as the work of Frank Tannenbaum falls into this category, it may be credited with pioneering the comparative study of slavery in its North and South American configurations. Scholars of recent years tend to view the movement of peoples, whether free or unfree, also as a trading enterprise, with the result that historians increasingly attribute relativities in the always harsh treatment of passengers to the profit motives of both the carriers and the ultimate employers rather than, as in earlier scholarship, to supposed variations in the sensibilities of European traders and planters from different national or religious backgrounds.5 Nonetheless, the investigation of the impact of both European Enlightenment ideas and those of Protestant evangelicals in discrediting first the slave trade, and then the institution of slavery itself, continues to attract the attention of scholars who also increasingly address their subject in a comparative Atlantic perspective.6
My third category includes economic historians interested more particularly in the history of trade, especially comparative intra-European trade of the early modern centuries. These address such questions as new trades, reexports, trading networks, and the relationship between long distance intercontinental trade and intra-European trade. These scholars generally query the impact of novel trades upon growing disparities in the commercial activity of various regions of Europe or of individual European countries. More particularly, some of these scholars are interested in the impact of such trades upon the development of an industrial revolution in England toward the close of the eighteenth century or, in more recent scholarship, their influence upon the emergence of what Jan de Vries has described as the industrious revolution. By this term de Vries means the dramatic increase in the production of marketable commodities within a traditional household context, which was stimulated by the desire of artisans to become consumers of the increasing range of luxury commodities that was becoming available to would-be consumers during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.7
Category four belongs to those who believe that there must be an Atlantic history, or at least a history of the Atlantic, to match that fashioned by Fernand Braudel for the Mediterranean and that outlined by Indian historians, several of them disciples of Braudel, who depict a flourishing trading world in the Indian Ocean long before the arrival there of European seaborne traders, a world that Asians continued to dominate for some centuries after Europeans had intruded upon that sphere. Those who are so inspired are obviously drawn to issues of geographical, geological, oceanographic, and, more generally, environmental constants that shaped, assisted, or constrained human endeavor. However, in the instance of the Atlantic they usually acknowledge that European, rather than African or American, peoples imagined the new worlds that might be fashioned within the limits set by nature, although they also give increasing attention to African, and, to a lesser degree, Native American inputs in molding these European-inspired constructs to better suit their ends.8
Another obvious scholarly group that falls within the ambit of Atlantic history includes historians of England or of Britain seeking to construct a wider focus for their subject. These can be social historians interested in witnessing how English or British social norms endured an Atlantic crossing; or disenchanted refugees from the so-called New British History whose protagonists decree that historical developments in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales should be interpreted as but several strands of a single process; or, more frequently, historians of British political thought of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries who can recognize how ideas formulated in Europe to resolve particular problems there came to be applied in different transatlantic contexts by those who had conveyed these ideas across the Atlantic in their cultural baggage. These scholars seek to illustrate the unique characteristics of the particular threads of political discourse that informed the creation of political institutions both within England, Scotland, and Ireland, and within the societies that people from these jurisdictions established on the other side of the Atlantic both before and after the era of the American Revolution.9 The apparently self-contained character of this subject is disturbed only by a few scholars’ recognition that political discourse both within the British monarchies and in colonial British America was occasionally influenced by debates on the continent of Europe, or by the recognition that British-inspired political institutions may have emerged in a more pristine form in other British communities of white settlement throughout the world besides those on the Atlantic periphery.10 The more wide-ranging of this group recognize that what they are investigating held implications also for groups of European colonists in the Americas other than the British, and to this extent we might credit them with inspiring the body of scholarly work associated with the so-called Atlantic Revolutions stretching forward from the American and French revolutions of the late eighteenth century to those in Latin America of the 1820s, and also embracing that in Haiti.11
The sixth category of aspirant Atlanticists belongs to historians of the United States wishing to counter the scholarly and popular tendency to depict North American achievements as exceptional. Their version of Atlantic history differs from most others in their concern to trace Atlantic interconnections over a long interval, including the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and including such subjects as trade, comparative industrialization, labor demands, and the transatlantic migrations that resulted from these interconnections. This line of investigation usually concludes with a consideration of U.S. engagement in the first and second World Wars and of Marshall plan aid. This line, to my mind, is the least convincing variety of Atlantic history because once the attention of its proponents moves forward chronologically from the early modern centuries, it remains fixed spatially as they persist in privileging Atlantic over Pacific or global connections and comparisons, despite the fact that they are treating centuries when Western peoples generally (Euro-Americans and Americans as well as Europeans) had devised maritime technologies which made it possible for them to engage in exploration, trade, and settlement on a global scale and not just within the Atlantic basin.12
My description of these six categories of Atlanticists should, in itself, make clear that not all who would wish to be considered Atlantic historians are concerned with the same issues or even with the same centuries. Moreover, as this chapter proceeds, I will be arguing that a reasonably coherent and autonomous Atlantic world existed only from soon after 1492 until about the 1820s. The concern to define the period for which Atlantic history is meaningful is closely related to the other core issue requiring resolution for each group of authors; that is, where Atlantic history ends and where global, or world, history begins. This particular problem has been identified by other contributors to this volume and also by other scholars who have engaged in recent discourse on the range and nature of Atlantic history.13 These issues raise the further question of what place remains for Atlantic history (if such has any legitimacy) within a larger framework of global history. These questions have assumed greater urgency in recent years by virtue of two publications that are breathtaking in scope and erudition, and that present challenges for Atlantic historians from all six defined categories. These challenges have seldom been confronted by Atlanticists, possibly because these books were not conceived within the paradigm of Atlantic history, but it is all the more necessary to address them because their theses are winning acceptance from historians of other subjects and scholars in other disciplines. The first book, by a German historian of labor and migration, is Dirk Hoerder’s Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium, and the second, by the foremost of Britain’s historians of empire, is C.A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914.14
Hoerder’s book presents a major challenge to Atlanticists because it implicitly rejects one feature that they consider unique to their subject—the large movement of migrants from Europe and Africa which made possible the peopling or repeopling of the Americas in the aftermath of conquest and depopulation. By demonstrating the propensity of human communities in all centuries and from all known cultural backgrounds to migrate from their heartlands to populate new lands, Hoerder shows that the movement of people from the Old World to the New between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was, for all its magnitude, a normal element in the continuum of human history. He has also discounted its novelty by pointing to the concern of leaders from most human societies and in all centuries to commandeer labor—both voluntarily and under compulsion—to meet onerous and hazardous obligations defined by the would-be masters. His argument that the universality of the methods used in several societies to mobilize workforces cannot be attributed solely to imitation or cross-cultural contact is nicely illustrated by reference to how workers were assembled in pre-Columbian America: a society that had had no remembered contact with peoples outside the Americas at the point when Europeans stumbled upon it.15
When he focuses particularly on the movement of people across the Atlantic during the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Hoerder neither questions its scale nor minimizes the atrocities, privations, and human suffering associated with it. However by situating these voluntary and forced migrations in global and wider chronological contexts, and by taking account of forced and voluntary human movements throughout the world during the course of the twentieth century (especially population movements within Europe and Asia both before and immediately after the Second World War), he seems to deprive Atlantic history of the one subject that was previously considered to render it distinctive. Moreover, he provides a geographic jolt to traditional presuppositions when he juxtaposes the dispersal of Chinese people throughout Asia over time with the so-called nineteenth-century “diaspora” of European migrants across the Atlantic, a subject that is important to the work of those in two of the six categories of Atlanticists I have defined.16
Chris Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World has relatively little to say about migration, at least in the statistical sense, but it presents a comprehensive challenge to Atlantic history because the book specifically denies the novelty and significance of most features that historians of the Atlantic have traditionally claimed as special to their subject. Bayly diminishes the subject’s importance when he estimates the total outcome of European overseas endeavors of the early modern centuries as no more than the establishment of “networks” of “archaic globalization … created by geographical expansion of ideas and social forces from the regional level to the inter-regional and inter-continental level.”17 Such networks, he contends (and here he obviously has Asian trades with Europe in mind), preceded and continued to run in parallel with, but were in no way necessary to, the achievement of “the first age of truly globalized imperialism,” which he associates with political developments in each of western Europe, Asia, and Africa during the period between 1760 and 1830. These decades, he contends, rather than the preceding centuries, led to “the market-driven uniformity of today’s world.” If European overseas endeavor of the early modern centuries is to be credited with promoting change, this contribution was, in Bayly’s estimation, at most “transitional,” leading into what he identifies as the profoundly innovatory decades, 1760–1830, which brought the world from a localized and technologically traditional past toward the infinitely complex and global transformation that it was to experience during the nineteenth century.18 In assessing the importance of Europe’s activity beyond its traditional frontiers during the early modern centuries, Bayly contends that only the development of “inter-regional” trades, especially that in slaves, can be considered a harbinger of modernity. Even then he describes the slave trade, for all its individualistic and brutal aspects, as but a “proto-capitalist industry.”19
This carefully argued and powerfully documented book therefore falls slightly short of declaring the concerns of Atlantic historians to be of little more than antiquarian interest. In response to this challenge, I will first question the premise from which Chris Bayly proceeds, and second, seek to clarify, in a more systematic way than has been done heretofore, the particular achievements of the early modern centuries on which most Atlantic history has been written. And it also seems appropriate to stake a claim for the vitality of Atlantic history by demonstrating the extent to which the four traits of modernity, as Chris Bayly has defined these, had already been achieved in the Atlantic world before 1760, the date from which he would have the modern world proceed. This will suggest that the progression of human society toward a condition that might be described as “modern” was more gradual that Bayly admits and that developments within the Atlantic world of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and the eighteenth centuries were more essential to its attainment than he acknowledges.
A society is modern, according to Bayly’s measurement, (1) when most (or a large number) of people there believe themselves to be modern; (2) when leaders of such societies abandon the ambition to achieve a universal monarchy that has been divinely ordained; (3) when it manifests the emergence of a national state representing centralization of power and loyalty to ethnic solidarity; and (4) when it is sustained by a massive explosion of global, commercial, and intellectual links.
When the Atlantic world of the early modern centuries is judged by the first of these standards, it becomes evident that for the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth century, those Europeans and their descendants of diverse nationalities who established themselves at several points around the Atlantic littoral, and within the continental areas of Central and South America, considered the various societies they shaped to be derivative of their particular societies in Europe—which, they all contended, set the standard for civil living. However, in several societies in the Americas (but not in those European implantations on the coastline of Africa with the possible exception of the Dutch settlement on the Cape of Good Hope), there emerged the phenomenon that historians refer to as creolization. This term describes the process whereby Europeans and their descendants placed in a colonial situation began to see and depict the society in which they were located as more moral than, and therefore superior to, the society from which their ancestors had departed for America. Historians have frequently explained the emergence of such an ideology as a colonial reaction to the patronizing attitude of government officials from the metropole and their agents in the colonies, especially when these agents sought to impose taxes to enable policies (including defensive policies) dictated from the center of power. However, there is also evidence that in some situations, colonials became increasingly proud of their own achievements, usually in the material, but sometimes also in the intellectual, sphere, and were coming to recognize their society as, in certain respects, more accomplished than the metropolitan society from which their forebears had come. Such manifestations might be dismissed as nothing more than colonial provincialism, but in those several instances where resentment of metropolitan rule led to resistance to that rule, and even to bids for political independence, the leaders of those newly independent jurisdictions that emerged displayed a ready willingness to declare their societies to be modern as opposed to that in the metropole whose authority they had discarded and which they could now portray as frozen in time.20 When we take into account such developments, it becomes evident that the former colonial world of the Atlantic, rather than the Old World of Europe (with the possible exception of France), produced the first crop of self-consciously modern jurisdictions.
On the issue of universal monarchy, it is manifest that the first generation of Spanish colonists and some of their spiritual advisers accepted that they had been specially chosen by God to discover and evangelize New World peoples. Some even asserted that this opportunity had been made available to them to compensate for the loss of Catholic influence in Europe due to the advances made by the Protestant Reformation. Other religiously inspired European groups that became involved in the Atlantic, including French Huguenots and English Puritans, were equally convinced that God had chosen them to bring native Americans to Him. These latter, however, espoused no ambition to rule the world; on the contrary, they were determined to counter what they believed were the Spanish ambitions to achieve universal monarchy. Even this determination became increasingly irrelevant with the passage of time because, subsequent to the mid-seventeenth century, few in Spain or in Spanish America fostered universal ambitions. Also, from that point forward, most people in Europe who ventured into the Atlantic world were motivated by commercial, political, and even cultural, rather than spiritual, considerations, although some groups, Catholics as well as Protestants, sought intermittently to persuade colonial populations to return to the spiritual first principles of their founders.21
The issue of ethnic solidarity is more difficult to contemplate in the context of Atlantic history since groups within nations, rather than states or monarchies, were most responsible for advances into the Atlantic. Moreover, European concern to master and augment the existing populations of the Americas led everywhere to the emergence of more ethnically diverse populations than had existed anywhere previously. These were frequently composed of Native Americans, people from many familial and ethnic groups in Africa, and Euro-Americans drawn from a variety of European backgrounds, religions, and nationalities. Nonetheless, as European powers came to appreciate the commercial importance of possessions and control of trade in the Atlantic, many sought to control particular areas of that world to meet their individual needs. This effort persisted until several former colonies made bids to imagine themselves as, and constitute themselves into, new nations that would be recognizable as nation-states of a European kind. In the course of doing so, each subsumed several ethnic groups (usually with the exception of Native Americans and African slaves) residing within their frontiers into a single cultural group.
In the matter of commercial links, Chris Bayly is probably correct to portray the new trading networks that developed between Europe and Asia during the early modern centuries as “archaic,” in that they were built upon, or were a substitution for, older trading connections and were primarily concerned (at least at the outset) with providing luxury goods for a wealthy elite who (as it happened) had little besides precious metal to offer in exchange.22 However, such trade contributed but incrementally to the quickening of economic activity in the Western world. Insofar as the newly fashioned intercontinental networks of trade contributed immediately to an industrious revolution of the De Vries type, this would have been in certain sophisticated parts of Asia—areas such as Gujarat—which for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries greatly increased the supply of Asian manufactured goods, notably Indian textiles and Chinese porcelains, so that they could obtain more American precious metals from European traders.
However the simultaneous trading activity in manufactured goods which developed on the Atlantic, to which Chris Bayly devotes scant attention, was the very obverse of the Asian developments because it stimulated the manufacture of goods in the more sophisticated parts of Europe and Africa, which were then exchanged for the variety of raw materials available in profusion from several regions of the Americas and which consumers in the Old World had come to covet. Atlantic trade was also different in character from that which developed between Europe and Asia, in that it aimed not only to satisfy the appetites of the rich but also was, at least from the early decades of the seventeenth century, aimed at creating a mass market for goods. It resulted both in the improvement in the quality of life of a broad spectrum of the population of the West, and in the quickening of the pace of economic activity in Europe and throughout the globe. The Atlantic trades, even more than their Asian counterparts, also provided goods for reexport throughout Europe and for their transmission to Asia and Africa, while they generated an ever increasing demand in the Americas for European produce and products ranging from such basic foodstuffs as wine and oil, livestock, grain, and poultry, to agricultural implements, house furnishing, cheap clothing for indentured servants and slaves, and luxury commodities for emerging elites. Such novel aspects of the Atlantic trades are attributable to the fact that they were generated by societies that, from the outset, were being newly fashioned by Europeans in the Americas, through the establishment of Western domination over indigenous populations, or the importation of African and European workers, or a combination of all three.
Another factor that made Atlantic trade different from any other was that it relied on the transport of people to cover marginal costs. Thus, though Dirk Hoerder is correct to insist that other human population movements were greater in scale than the mass one that passed from Europe and Africa to the Americas during the course of four centuries, there was none other where the carriage of people was essential to turning a profit on the entire trading transaction. The central importance of the transport of humans (free and unfree) to cover costs on the outward journey was as great for the conduct of the Spanish transatlantic trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as for that of the English and Portuguese during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.23
The boost given by Atlantic trade to innovation in manufacturing and marketing within Europe, and to European commercial contacts with Asia and Africa, becomes more apparent when account is taken of the economic benefits for the Old World populations that derived from the principal trades that were conducted across the Atlantic in successive centuries. These were silver, furs, and fish in profusion in the sixteenth century; these same commodities, together with sugar, tobacco, dyestuffs, and timber products in the seventeenth century; and these, together with massive food supplies in the eighteenth century, but with trade in Peruvian silver then giving way to Brazilian gold as the precious metal that lubricated an emerging global economy. Most of the output that led to these intercontinental trades, especially during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were, as Chris Bayly acknowledges, enabled both by the African slave trade and (as Bayly hardly mentions) by the trade in indentured servants from Europe to America. More significantly, the seemingly insatiable demand for labor in all parts of the Americas was ultimately the result of the decimation of the Native American populations; a destruction of life on a scale without precedent in human experience that resulted from the various contacts that Native Americans had had with Europeans and Euro–Americans. When this population loss is calculated and placed beside the parallel endeavors of Europeans in all parts of the Americas to create a sequence of novel societies modeled on European-imagined constructs, it becomes evident that it was within the Atlantic basin of the early modern centuries that a complex society fashioned ultimately by a Western desire to achieve a “market-driven uniformity” first came into being.24 Even if conceding the principal point of Chris Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World—that the Western drive to impose such uniformity on the world became manifest only after the political, military, and naval revolutions of the interlude 1760–1830—it strikes me that the Europeans of that generation had become confident that such market-driven uniformity was attainable at the global level only because they were already familiar with the prototype of the modern that had been fashioned after long centuries of travail in the Atlantic. I would also suggest that such previous experience in the Atlantic provided Europeans of the nineteenth century with the assurance to undertake the creation of European-like societies in Australia and New Zealand, with the same consequence for native populations as in the Americas. This suggestion is all the more plausible because nineteenth-century imperial apologists frequently used the same legal and moral rationalizations to legitimate their actions as had helped ease the consciences of those who were, in effect, the creators of human calamity in the Atlantic world of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.
I am offering this response to the challenges presented by publications of Hoerder, Bayly, and several others who have likewise raised questions concerning the scope, coherence, and validity of Atlantic History,25 with a view to promoting a better understanding of a vibrant world that flourished for the full duration of the early modern centuries. This had been fashioned by several European groups working in concert and in competition one with the other, but also in conjunction with Native American and African peoples. Work by several scholars working together and alone has defined a Hispanic, a French, a British, and even a Portuguese Atlantic (by which can be understood individual sections of the Atlantic basin dominated by one set of European actors). However, relatively few scholars explain that such spaces were but elements of a greater whole, since the settlers within any one sector relied ultimately upon those dominated by other European groups to supply it with goods or markets, or to help it in meeting its need for a labor force. Thus, for example, even an apparently self-sufficient Spanish Atlantic came to rely on Portuguese traders to supply it with African slaves after persistently high mortality rates among the native population had eroded the supply of indigenous labor Spanish settlers had previously taken for granted, and seventeenth-century French settlers in the West Indies relied heavily on Dutch traders to supply them with European goods and produce as well as with African slaves. I would also draw attention to the dynamic economy that developed on the several Caribbean islands under various European jurisdictions and to the dependency (licit and illicit) that the European settler populations on each island had upon traders and settlers associated with islands (and even mainland settlements) controlled by European governments other than their own.
The reality of the Atlantic experience seems to have been that as European traders, explorers, and officials familiarized themselves with the Atlantic Ocean and the best means of traversing that body of water in either direction, as well as with the resources and opportunities which it, its islands, and its coastlines provided them, they began to depict it as a place apart even if they did not designate it the Atlantic world. For example, in 1707 Sir Hans Sloane included in the first volume of his comprehensive study of the natural history of Jamaica what we today would describe as a map of the Atlantic world but which he titled “A New Chart of the Western Ocean.” This particular chart was one of three, the other two being one of the island of Jamaica and the other of the Caribbean; each designed to illustrate the wider context within which its predecessor would be comprehended. But if Sloane appeared to represent an apparently self-contained Atlantic world, he, more than most of his generation, was also thinking universally, since his primary purpose in studying and describing the natural resources of the island of Jamaica was to make it possible for him to relate what he discovered to plants and animals already known to educated Europeans, with a view to contributing to a classification of the world’s resources that would have universal application.26
In that sense Sloane was acknowledging what some recent historians have been arguing: that, for all its size and the opportunities which it presented, the Atlantic world was but one of several interacting sectors of trade and settlement spread across the globe to which Europeans had access.27 These spheres of influence have been best described in this volume, and elsewhere, by Peter Coclanis, and few would disagree with his assertions, like those of most commentators on this subject, that European activity in the Atlantic must be considered in conjunction with European endeavors in other parts of the world, particularly in Asia.28 Most would also be persuaded by the argument, most recently articulated by Paul Mapp, that the search for a direct route to Asia, which inspired Columbus to sail westward into the Atlantic in the first instance, remained a prime motivating factor for some explorers and the makers of charts of the Atlantic long after the true circumference of the globe had been established and long after it had been realized that fortunes, careers, and even dynasties could be achieved as readily within the Atlantic sphere as elsewhere.29
Thus, while many of Sloane’s generation could think universally, and while some might even try to break through the geographic shackles that prevented them from seeking after opportunity on a global scale, they had to confront a reality that remained constant until the 1780s: that Western peoples (Americans as well as Europeans) could not be true global adventurers because they lacked the knowledge and skills systematically to navigate the Pacific in the way that they could navigate the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Despite this constraint, some Western people did move from one sphere of European trading influence to the other, and in doing so became, in a sense, world figures or at least figures with experience of a goodly part of the globe. Those who did so, however, always had to negotiate their way through a European conduit in order to move from one sphere of action to another, a fact that is nowhere better illustrated than in Linda Colley’s outstanding reconstruction of the life of the previously obscure eighteenth-century figure Elizabeth Marsh. This character was conceived by her parents in Jamaica, experienced hardship in Morocco, spent a significant part of her career in India, but made the vital social and institutional connections in London that enabled her to translate herself from one sector of the world to another.30
While saluting Elizabeth Marsh, and also those other characters, ranging from clergymen and naval officers to common sailors and their women, whose intercontinental movements are being pieced together by Alison Games and others,31 we must also acknowledge that previous to the 1780s, when a solution had been found to the problem of determining longitude with greater precision, such individuals were exceptional. During the three centuries before then, those who promoted trade and settlement beyond the confines of Europe usually limited their attention to one sphere of activity, not least because the truly long-distance trade by water between Europe and Asia around the southern tip of Africa was managed differently from trade within Europe and across the Atlantic and required greater creditworthiness, including the ability to invest in what, by the standards of the time, were extraordinarily large purpose-built craft.
Such impediments to human endeavor on a global scale confirm my opinion that the three centuries of the early modern period were those when what historians describe as an Atlantic world was shaped and flourished. I propose that those who would write the history of that world as a totality should concentrate on those centuries, and give attention also to the half-century that followed, when what previously had been a largely self-contained Atlantic world was absorbed into a global space. In this spirit Sir John Elliott presents his magisterial Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830, which can be recommended as an interesting case study of Atlantic history, first because it alludes to the limitations as well as to the merits of that subject, and second because it demonstrates how knowledge can be advanced through comparison; in this case, by comparing developments in the Spanish-dominated sector of the Atlantic, that Elliott knows best, with the area of North America which was brought under British influence over the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, which has been studied most.32 The big question that drives Elliott’s inquiry is why two European-dominated transatlantic empires, which had functioned effectively for centuries, suddenly, and within a half-century of each other, fell apart.33 However, in the course of seeking a resolution to that problem, Elliott develops several other comparisons that collectively sustain a comprehensive corrective to received wisdom (received, that is, within the Anglophone academic world) on the shaping of the two principal empires within the Atlantic world. This corrective holds that whether measured in terms of urban development, artistic achievement, the recruitment of a European work-force of talent (although not necessarily of ingenuity), the opportunities offered to European settlers to stay alive and make good, and even efforts made to advance the religious reform and partial assimilation of significant elements of the Native American population to Western norms, the achievements of those who went to the Spanish Empire in the Atlantic far outmatched those of their counterparts who shaped the Euro-American society that emerged in colonial British America.
Though it remains interesting in its own right, the Elliott book is especially important because it points to the enormous potential for acquiring further insights into the dynamic and varied character of the Atlantic world of the early modern centuries, once specialists on other domains of European interest in the Atlantic basin develop similar comparisons with the achievements of rival settler communities. Here one can think of comparisons that might be developed among Portuguese, Dutch, and English traders as conveyers and retailers of slaves; between the English and the French as promoters and managers of sugar plantations; between the evangelization efforts of Protestant and Catholic missionaries; or between the ways in which any two or several European dominant groups interacted with the indigenous populations they encountered.
To say this is not to suggest that progress in Atlantic history can occur only when research is undertaken in a comparative mode. Far from it: the subject is new, and has only begun to be studied. Much fundamental empirical research within particular spheres and areas of endeavor in the Atlantic world remains to be accomplished before some comparisons can be made. However, the fact that one can point to endless interesting potential comparative studies indicates that the totality of the Atlantic experience will be savored only when the achievements of the particular are placed in the context of the more general. Such comparisons (and they do require linguistic and archival competencies that practitioners of Atlantic history must be encouraged to develop) are certain to establish how rich, varied, cruel, and sublime were the human experiences lived out in the Atlantic world of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and also how developments there affected contemporary events in Europe and Africa and contributed to the shaping of the modern world. When such connections have been made, it will become equally clear that despite being a largely self-contained space, the Atlantic world of the early modern centuries remained susceptible to influences from the traditional Old World and other areas of the globe in which Europeans had established a presence. The best-known of such interactions was the introduction by Europeans of Asian crops which they strove to produce commercially in the Americas, particularly on the islands of the West Indies, or the stimulus to, or distortion of, traditional economic activity in the Americas produced by seemingly insatiable European and Asian appetites for precious metals and the other prime materials that America could supply in profusion. There were, of course, multitudinous other such connections, great and small, obvious and unexpected, and extending into the cultural field.
Thus, one of the principal attractions of Atlantic history is that the interactions that concern it have only begun to be investigated, which explains why the living subject, as I have delineated it, does not fit neatly with any of the six typologies with which this chapter commenced. Another factor that adds to its fascination is that while the Atlantic world of the early modern centuries, which I contend should be the subject of Atlantic history, was a largely self-contained space, it was not a hermetically sealed one. However, because of this I am concerned that the entire subject may be subsumed within increasingly fashionable global or world history, which is ultimately focused on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, with scant regard for any developments in previous centuries other than the extent to which these contributed to the achievement of a globalized world. Therefore, the essential purpose of this chapter has been to explain that Atlantic history can be associated with a particular place and with particular centuries, and is worthy of study in its own right rather than as an appendage to some other history. Moreover, I believe that when it is approached in this manner, the subject will prove interesting to scholars, students, and readers of other times and places because the commercial, political, and cultural problems encountered by actors of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries would recur as their imitators acted out their parts on a truly global scale in the centuries that lay ahead.
1. David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in David Armitage and Michael Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 11–27; the historiography of the subject is best treated in Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005).
2. Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History; or Re-Configuring the History of Colonial British America,” Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1093–1114, and “Atlantic History: What and Why?” European Review 9 (2001): 399–411.
3. Felipe Fernando Armesto, Millennium: A History of the last Thousand Years (London: Bantam Press, 1995); Ralph Davies, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (Ithica, N.Y.: Cornell University Press: 1973); J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Martin Daunton and Richard Halpern, eds., Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850 (London: University College London Press,, 1999); Donna Merwick, Death of a Notary and Possessing Albany (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), and The Shame and the Sorrow: Dutch–Amerindian Encounters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Gilles Havard and Cécile Vidal, Histoire de l’Amérique française (Paris,: Flammarion, 2003); Horst Pietschmann, ed., Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1500–1830 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002).
4. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 1991); Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
5. Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986), and Voyagers to the West: Emigration from Britain to America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Taurus, 1986); Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York:, Knopf, 1946); James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Marianne S. Wokeck, Trade in Strangers: The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, Les Traites négrières: Essai d’histoire globale (Paris: Gallimard, 2004); David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth Sokoloff, eds., Slavery in the Development of the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); David Eltis et. al., eds., The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Data-Base on CD-ROM (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David B. Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). It is interesting to note that the French study of slavery as represented by the book by Pétré-Grenouilleau is conceived as a contribution to global history; since then a conference on slavery organized at Nantes in June 2005 by the École des Hautes Études, was conceived “dans les espaces atlantiques”; and a conference held at Université Paris Diderot in December 2006 was titled “Des Colonies aux républiques dans un monde atlantique.”
6. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies in the Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York:, New York University Press, 1999); Christopher Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
7. Jan de Vries. “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 54 (1994): 240–270; David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Wim Klooster, Illicit Riches: Dutch Trade in the Caribbean (Leiden: Kitvl Press, 1998); Ralph Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973); Klaus Weber, Deutsche Kaufluet im Atlantikhandel, 1680–1830 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2004); Claudia Schnurmann, Vom Inselreich zur Weltmacht (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2001); James D. Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Peggy Liss, Atlantic Empires: The Network of Trade and Revolution, 1713–1826 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); P. K. O’Brien, ed., The Industrial Revolution in Europe, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
8. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Sian Reynolds, 2 vols. (N.Y: Harper, 1972–1973); K.N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); O. Prakash, European Commercial Expansion in Early Modern Asia (London: Variorum, 1997); D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986–1998); John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
9. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (N.Y: Scribner, 1965); David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Greater Britain 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History ((Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004); Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Andrew Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonization, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Armitage and Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World; Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas, eds., The Creation of the British Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
10. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Fitzmaurice, Humanism and America; J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
11. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–1964); Jacques Godechot, France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799, trans. Herbert Rowen (New York: Macmillan, 1965); Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).
12. For examples, see some of the contributions to the special issue of Journal of American History on “The Nation State and Beyond,” 86 (December 1999).
13. Canny, “Atlantic History: What and Why?”; “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic,” with contributions by Alison Games, Philip J. Stern, Paul W. Mapp, and Peter A. Coclanis, in William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser., 63 (2006): 675–742.
14. Dirk Hoerder, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002); C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).
15. Hoerder. Cultures in Contact, pp. 188–189.
16. Ibid., pp. 5, 170–174, 369–373.
17. Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, pp. 44–47.
18. Ibid., pp. 44, 49–120.
19. Ibid., p. 44.
20. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); David A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: 1991); Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
21. On the similarity between the preoccupations of fundamentalist Catholics and Protestants in the Atlantic, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550–1700 (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 2006).
22. Niels Steensgaard, Carracks, Caravans and Companies: The Structural Crisis in the European Asian Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century (Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 1973).
23. Nuala Zahedieh, “Overseas Expansion and Trade in the Seventeenth century,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 398–422.
24. The phrase is from Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p. 44.
25. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–2000 (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2007); see details on the William and Mary Quarterly issue in note 13.
26. The three maps were included together in one pull-out illustration in Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madeira, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, vol. 1 (London, 1707); Sloane was aware of his being involved in a competition to become the recognized authority on the classification of plants, and he both cited and corrected others. One author to whom he referred persistently was Plumier, who must have been the Franciscan Charles Plumier, who had made significant progress in this domain in Nova plantarum americanarum genera, authore P. Carlos Plumier … (Paris, 1703).
27. See especially Alison Games, “English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections,” and Philip J. Stern, “British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections,” in William and Mary Quarterly “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic” issue, 3rd ser., 53 (October 2006): 675–712.
28. See Peter A. Coclanis, “Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?,” in William and Mary Quarterly “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic” issue, 3rd ser., 53 (October 2006): 725–742; the approach he favors was also adopted in Nicholas Canny, “Asia, the Atlantic, and the Subjects of the British Monarchy,” in Barry Coward, ed., A Companion to Stuart Britain (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 45–66.
29. See Paul W. Mapp, “Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental and Pacific Perspectives,” in William and Mary Quarterly “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic,” 3rd ser., 53 (October 2006): 713–724.
30. Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (London: Pantheon: 2007).
31. Games, “English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections,” and The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
32. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
33. Ibid., pp. xvii–xviii.