Atlantic history is an analytic construct and an explicit category of historical analysis that historians have devised to help them organize the study of some of the most important developments of the early modern era: the emergence in the fifteenth century and the subsequent growth of the Atlantic basin as a site for demographic, economic, social, cultural, and other forms of exchange among and within the four continents surrounding the Atlantic Ocean—Europe, Africa, South America, and North America—and all the islands adjacent to those continents and in that ocean. As people, pathogens, and plants—to mention just three key agents of change—moved ever more intensively across the Atlantic, profound transformations occurred in all spheres of life. Events in one place had repercussions in others. Atlantic history, as John Elliott elegantly puts it, involves the study of “the creation, destruction, and re-creation of communities as a result of the movement, across and around the Atlantic basin, of people, commodities, cultural practices, and values.”1
If the concept of Atlantic history is fairly new—the first institutional use of the term being traced to the late 1960s, when the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University spearheaded the establishment of its Program in Atlantic History and Culture—the practice is not. As early as the 1870s, Herbert Baxter Adams located the narrative of American history in the Atlantic world, tied to a genetic germ theory that is no longer in favor. During the first half of the twentieth century, Charles McLean Andrews, a specialist on the British Empire, and C. H. Haring, a student of the Spanish Empire, were the most prominent among many historians of early modern empire who took a transoceanic perspective. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, historians of exploration and discovery, such as David Beers Quinn, effectively did Atlantic history long before it became fashionable. The same can be said about Perry Miller’s analyses of Puritan religious development, Wesley Frank Craven’s account of the settlement of Virginia, Bernard Bailyn’s study of seventeenth-century New England merchants, James Lockhart’s work on sixteenth-century Spanish Peru, and a host of other works by prominent scholars of the early colonial Americas. It is easy to think of key studies, such as Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946), Philip Curtin’s Atlantic Slave Trade (1969), Ian Steele’s The English Atlantic (1981), or D. W. Meinig’s Atlantic America (1986), that took a transatlantic perspective before the term became a buzzword.2 Jacques Godechot’s Histoire de l’Atlantique (1947) was perhaps the first to use such a title, although the book was in fact a circumscribed maritime history; Leonard Outhwaite’s The Atlantic (1957) was also narrowly conceived.3 If none of these authors thought of what they were doing as Atlantic history or referred to themselves as Atlanticists, few scholars by the early 1950s would have thought that one could adequately study any of the many colonial Americas without an understanding of their European antecedents.4
Notwithstanding the success of the Johns Hopkins program, no university replicated its model in the 1970s and 1980s.5 Since then, however, Atlantic history has emerged as an explicit area of study that, at least in the United States, is challenging the primacy of traditional national or imperial modes of organizing historical understanding. The earliest advocates of Atlantic history thought of it primarily as a perspective that would broaden the horizons of specialists in traditional fields by calling attention to the larger contexts and promoting transnational comparisons. Their primary goal was to create not a new field of historical studies, but a group of scholars appreciative of common themes and differences across as well as within national boundaries and language areas, able to put their own specialized works within the larger framework of the loose but cohering Atlantic world. This approach remains an appealing option for Atlantic studies.
By contrast, more recent exponents of Atlantic history, with a measure of missionary fervor, have increasingly begun to think of Atlantic history not merely as a perspective, but as a full-blown field of study with the potential to encompass older fields such as European, American, African, or Latin American history, and the imperial and national histories such continental classifications have traditionally assumed. So far, no Atlantic History Association or Organization of Atlantic History has appeared, but existing professional historical organizations, such as the American Historical Association, have shown a growing interest in the topic of Atlantic history.6 H-Net now sponsors an online discussion list known as H-Atlantic, and there have been many special issues or forums in a wide variety of journals. Atlantic history has become a subject about which scholars give papers, departments offer employment, and publishers create journals and book series. In 2007 the first Atlantic history textbook appeared.7
The institutionalization of the subject in higher education has followed suit. In 1996 Harvard University established its International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, which has since sponsored annual seminars and many workshops that have involved the production of over 500 papers and talks by participants from many countries.8 Other American universities have also established programs in Atlantic history, as have colleges and universities throughout the world—from Galway in Ireland to Sydney in Australia, from Edinburgh in Scotland to Hamburg in Germany—all of which offer courses in Atlantic history.9
Although Atlantic history is thriving institutionally and intellectually, much angst can be heard in scholarly circles about the perspective’s or field’s direction. In one sense, the agonizing is strange, for Atlantic history seems superficially unproblematic. Surely it is simply the study of the ocean, an expanse of water, a geographical expression—the first, in Pierre and Huguette Chaunu’s estimation, “to have been regularly crossed”—and of the lands bordering on or connected to it. Yet, despite the seeming naturalness of the subject—simply conceiving of the Atlantic world in D. W. Meinig’s terms as “the scene of a vast interaction”—Atlantic history sets some people’s teeth on edge. Peter Coclanis, paraphrasing Robert Reich, has characterized Atlantic history as “one of those rare ideas that [has] moved swiftly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.”10
This critical response seems to be driven by a number of general concerns. Some critics are alarmed by the imperialism of the more exuberant exponents of Atlantic history, who seem bent on absorbing traditional national and imperial fields of study while neglecting those subjects that do not fit neatly into an Atlantic framework. Others see no need to transform Atlantic history from a useful historical perspective into a formal field. Still others find it suspiciously trendy and are doubtful of its staying power.
Whatever the sources of their concerns, critics have raised at least five substantive objections to Atlantic history’s popularity that merit serious consideration. First, some critics allege that the Atlantic has little coherence and no real unity, and that it is therefore impossible to speak with confidence of an Atlantic system, region, or civilization in the way that Fernand Braudel spoke of the Mediterranean—and even he might have exaggerated that region’s unity. The Mediterranean was, as Braudel conceded, “a complex of seas,” but the Atlantic was even more so, and it joined societies with radically different environments and cultures.11 Thus, the winds and currents of the Atlantic created at least two separate Atlantics—a North and a South; John Elliott, following D. W. Meinig’s formulation, identifies three Atlantics: a North European, a Spanish, and a Luso version; others argue that the Atlantic was largely an English or British phenomenon and never meant as much to the Spanish, French, Dutch, or Portuguese; some prefer Atlantics of different hues—white to represent the European migration; black, as in Paul Gilroy’s account, to represent the African diaspora; green to describe the Irish dispersal; red to mark a radical international working class; and perhaps tartan for the Scots. And yet others divide the Atlantic world by climate or agricultural use—tropical versus temperate; farm or peasant versus plantation.12 It seems more manageable, therefore, to think of separate Atlantics rather than an integrated one.
Second, the Atlantic was never self-contained; all seas are joined, and thus the Atlantic was never a bounded entity. Furthermore, the argument goes, focusing on connections across and within the Atlantic risks minimizing the connections outside the region. Descriptions of the Atlantic as akin to an inland sea are deeply misleading, the critics allege. Trade and settlement in the Atlantic, for instance, were clearly linked to simultaneous ventures in Asia. In this volume, chapters 12 and 13, respectively written by Nicholas Canny and Peter Coclanis, present versions of this point of view.
Third, Atlantic history is merely imperial history in a more acceptable guise. It can be characterized, in William O’Reilly’s words, as “a neo-colonial, politically correct attempt at re-writing European history with some ‘other bits’ given deferential treatment.” Indeed, for Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, it privileges an east–west axis over alternative north–south perspectives, so that Latin America tends to get short shrift.13
Fourth, students of the indigenous Americas have complained that Atlantic history, by focusing on those land areas bordering on the Atlantic, either deflects attention from inland populations and places or leaves them out of the picture altogether, a point that applies equally well to those areas occupied by mixed peoples, settlers, and traders. To counter this tendency to privilege the history of coastal areas and the spread of European peoples, they advocate, as does Peter Wood in chapter 10 of this volume, what some scholars refer to as a “continental” approach in which each of the continents surrounding the Atlantic becomes a principal site for investigation.14
Fifth, as Elliott has complained, much of the work thus far published with an explicitly Atlantic focus has tended to focus upon the connections that tied the many areas of the Atlantic together or, one might add, upon transnational relations within border zones at the expense of developments within discrete areas, and even without much concern about specifying how those connections and transnational relations affected the internal histories of the areas that they connected. By failing, moreover, to advance knowledge about the internal histories of the specific areas that comprised the Atlantic world much beyond what had previously been gained through studies done within national imperial and area studies frameworks, Atlanticists, this line of criticism suggests, have thus shown little concern for pursuing comparative analysis and the identification of commonalities and peculiarities within this highly variegated Atlantic world, surely one of the principal promises of Atlantic history.15
These criticisms of Atlantic history contain considerable cogency, but they need not be seen as crippling. Relative to the first, the lands bordering the Atlantic were, of course, remarkably complex and diverse. The Atlantic was multitudinous, comprised enormous variations, and lacked unity. A congeries of entities, each with distinctive features, the Atlantic world was no single system or civilization. But the creation of the Atlantic world increasingly drew many people throughout the Atlantic basin into the colonial project, a vast enterprise in which some people, with or without state help, expropriated the territories, resources, and labor of indigenous and imported peoples in their remarkably successful effort to transform accessible areas of the Americas from indigenous into Europeanized cultural spaces. To be sure, there were profound variations in this transformation, according to differences in physical characteristics and resource endowment; the strength, proximity, and capacity for resistance among indigenous peoples; the cultural proclivities and size of the conquering, trading, and settling populations that constituted the leading edge of that transformation and were its principal beneficiaries; and their access to capital and labor, willing or unwilling, indigenous to the area or imported from Europe, Africa, or other regions in the Americas. Although this phenomenon extended across national spheres of colonizing activity and was far more often competitive than cooperative, it involved people everywhere in parallel, if also distinctive and otherwise largely unconnected, processes that, at the deepest level, linked the new and old societies of the Atlantic basin world into the same general colonial undertaking. Though this development was never wholly confined to the Atlantic world, for over three centuries it did center in it and shape it. This common Atlantic project provides the broad setting for identifying and explaining its many variations.
Moreover, pan-Atlantic webs of association linked people, objects, and beliefs across and within the region. Though always fragmented, the early modern Atlantic world came to be increasingly united through a density and variety of connections. Events in one corner of the Atlantic world reverberated thousands of miles away. As David Eltis notes, “the result was, if not a single Atlantic society, a set of societies fundamentally different from what they would have been without participation in the new transatlantic network.” A pan-Atlantic mosaic gradually emerged, with “larger Atlantic circuits binding together four continents,” in D. W. Meinig’s phrase.16 The task therefore is to demonstrate connections and explore contrasts. The great virtue of thinking in Atlantic terms is that it encourages broad perspectives, transnational orientations, and expanded horizons at the same time that it offers a chance for overcoming national and other parochialisms.
Of course, this unified maritime region is a modern cultural construction. In the early modern world, few people recognized a single Atlantic, as Joyce Chaplin shows in chapter 1; insofar as anybody thought of the stretch of water now known as the Atlantic, most Europeans saw it as a series of distinct seas. The Atlantic is therefore an anachronistic concept. Rather than simply taking the spatial framework of a given body of water and its surrounding lands for granted, it should be interrogated for its contemporary connotations as well as for the interactions of peoples around, within, and across it. Attention to early modern understandings and to modern cultural constructions should be pursued simultaneously.17
As for the second objection to Atlantic history, a web of connections outside of the Atlantic world always existed. Europeans were able to engage in regular Atlantic voyaging only after incorporating such elements as the compass and the sternpost rudder, borrowed from Chinese and Indian Ocean mariners; Asian textiles and Indian Ocean cowrie shells were vital to the Atlantic slave trade; Americans dumped Asian tea into Boston Harbor; American bullion, especially silver, fueled Europe’s trade with the Ottoman Empire, India, and China. If vital parts of the story the historian wishes to tell lie outside the Atlantic basin, naturally they should be pursued. Nevertheless, there was an intensity of interaction and activity within the Atlantic world that still merits focused attention. Thus, European overseas migration before the early nineteenth century was primarily across or around the Atlantic, and European overseas settler expansion was largely confined to the western side of the Atlantic basin for more than three centuries, with only a small flow of Europeans into Africa and Asia. Similarly, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the external slave trade of sub-Saharan Africa was at its height, almost nine out of ten African slaves were forcibly transported across the Atlantic rather than across the Sahara or to the Indian Ocean. If Africa’s exporting of its people abroad is the focus, then the Atlantic looms largest, even if the full context must always be kept in mind. Thus, while the Atlantic was always enmeshed in a wider world, it has its own coherence and its own importance; it was, after all, the center, as C. A. Bayly notes, of the first global imperial age.18
Concerning the third objection, there is nothing wrong with studying empires; they were vital entities in this period, and for some subjects, such as English, Dutch, and French efforts to penetrate or seize portions of Spain’s American empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or the great contest for imperial supremacy over North America and the Caribbean from 1739 to 1763, an imperial framework may be more useful than an Atlantic one.19 But imperial boundaries were permeable and there was considerable crossing of imperial lines. Of course, much activity occurred within a single imperial entity; illicit trade, smuggling, piracy, and venturing across imperial boundaries were the exception, not the norm. Nevertheless, Atlantic history is not warmed-over imperial history, nor is it simply a combination of imperial histories. Addressing this point, Bernard Bailyn has noted that “Atlantic history is not additive; it is more than the sum of its parts.” Benjamin Schmidt’s Dutch Imagination and the New World 1570–1670, T. M. Devine’s Scotland’s Empire, and Tamar Herzog’s Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America are three superb examples of what can be done by looking at particular imperial worlds in large Atlantic and global contexts. There is also no reason why east–west lines of influence should predominate over those that ran in a south–north direction. All axes need to be considered, although, for some questions, particular directional flows may well be more important than others.20
Regarding the fourth objection, Atlantic history does not have to subsume all the societies, polities, and populations living on the continents surrounding the Atlantic. Developments in central and eastern Europe, in central and eastern Africa and on its Indian Ocean coast, and in the interior and western portions of the two American continents and on their Pacific coasts may well be less tightly linked to those in the Atlantic and better approached through other perspectives, including both the continental and, for the Americas as a whole, the hemispheric perspective recommended by Jack Greene in chapter 11 of this volume. Yet, as Amy Bushnell and Philip Morgan show, respectively, about indigenous America and Africa in chapters 7 and 8, it remains an interesting and important question how deeply Atlantic developments penetrated and reshaped the old worlds into which Europeans ventured and how far their interactions with these other old worlds affected Europe itself. If the Atlantic framework cannot explain all of the things that happened on four continents, it can still provide a useful perspective on many of them.
Finally, concerning the fifth objection, in this early stage in the development of Atlantic history, the emphasis on connections and interactions is understandable. These are precisely the questions that were either ignored or confined within national boundaries by older perspectives, and there is no inherent reason why an Atlantic paradigm cannot foster a deeper appreciation of contrasts and stimulate informative work in comparative history.
Atlantic history, then, is not necessarily a flawed, conceptually muddled subject; rather, approached in the right way, it can be a highly fruitful and promising field of inquiry. It is best seen as a framework, an angle of vision, an arena of analysis. For some issues, the Atlantic frame of reference may be too limiting and constraining. In particular cases—following the pathways of silver currency, for example—the goal may well be to connect East and West, the Pacific and the Atlantic. To answer other questions, however, the Atlantic as a whole may be too capacious an entity. Histories of the Atlantic world—even if some small slice of it—will always be extraordinarily difficult to accomplish; histories within the Atlantic world—invariably slices of it as well—inevitably will prove far more manageable. As further encouragement to both histories of and within the Atlantic world, we offer six propositions for doing Atlantic history, building upon some of the best ways to approach the vast space that the ocean and its surrounding lands encompass while trying to avoid the many pitfalls. These propositions are not meant to be exhaustive, just useful pointers for future work.
First, the effort to find general patterns in Atlantic history must not exaggerate either the connections or the contrasts. John Elliott’s magisterial comparative study of the Spanish and British New World empires offers a model in this regard, by avoiding “a series of sharp dichotomies” while eschewing “an insistence on similarity at the expense of difference, [which] is liable to be equally reductionist.” Elliott triumphantly negotiates this complex balancing act by “constantly comparing, juxtaposing, and interweaving the two stories” of Spanish and British enterprises in America. Both empires, for example, legitimated themselves by referring to God’s providential design; both experienced the rise of creole communities and local patriotism; both saw metropolitan reforms challenge settler autonomy, leading to reluctant local revolts. At the same time, Spain’s American colonies incorporated Indians and accepted interracial mixture, whereas Britain’s American colonies sought to segregate indigenous peoples and prohibit or discourage interracial unions; one developed a “culture of show,” the other “a culture of restraint”; political independence arose out of a crisis of integration in British America and a crisis of disintegration in Spanish America. The British and Spanish American empires are sufficiently alike, yet significantly different, that they provide intelligent commentaries upon one another. Each entity looks different in light of the other; and understanding of the one is enlarged by knowledge of the other.21
Second, some Atlantic history must be interactive and cross borders. Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange was a pioneer in exploring the commodities and diseases that circulated back and forth across this intercontinental highway. Since Crosby’s pathbreaking work, studies of single commodities—whether sugar, cod, salt, chocolate, tobacco, vanilla, or cochineal—have been fashionable, in part because they can link producers, distributors, and consumers, providing a circum-Atlantic navigation, as it were. In process are studies of coffee, mahogany, pearls, a linked study of chocolate and tobacco; and no doubt other trees, plants, and dyes, such as logwood, brazilwood, sarsaparilla, ipecacuanha, jalap root, cinchona, groundnuts, pineapple, and indigo will not be far behind. And there is still much to learn from studies of commodities that we thought we knew well. Consider Stuart Schwartz’s superb edited collection of essays, Tropical Babylon, a study of the embryonic sugar industry, which uncovers “a constellation of sugar industries, developing in tag-team fashion, sharing similar technology.” Sugar itself determined very little; the form its production took throughout the Atlantic world owed much to decisions, actions, reactions, and interactions made on both sides of the ocean.22
Crossing conventional borders is often a feature of Atlantic history. Thus Matthew Mulcahy follows the track of hurricanes, a quintessential Atlantic phenomenon, measuring their impact both in the British West Indies and along the North American mainland, seeing both as part of a Greater Caribbean, a larger plantation complex. Perhaps his work will inspire an even broader trans-imperial investigation of the role and effects of hurricanes regularly sweeping across the Atlantic basin. An extreme example of border-crossing is provided by the diasporic community known as the “Portuguese Nation”—an international group of Portuguese merchants, traders, and mariners, many of Jewish ancestry—who formed a remarkable trading network that spanned the Atlantic. They were, as Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert has shown in fascinating detail, “a nation without a state, a collectivity dispersed across the seas.” Despite their mobility, dispersion, and composite religious culture, La Nação constituted a tightly knit and dynamic group, often monopolizing trade in all the major commodities within and beyond the Spanish Empire. They were “a community of circulation rather than one based on permanent attachment to a single territory.” Their networks were remarkably decentralized, a spiderweb rather than the typical hub-and-spokes model.23
The intense interactivity that can characterize much Atlantic history does not necessarily have to be explored on both sides of the ocean; it can focus, for example, on the crossing of imperial boundaries on just one littoral. Thus one might point, as Nicholas Canny has done, to the development of a common European pool of knowledge about the processes and consequences of colonization. Authors of whatever nationality and religion drew upon the same authorities to justify their involvement in actions that were morally dubious. Or consider April Hatfield’s Atlantic Virginia, which valuably focuses on intercolonial linkages and foreign borrowings, particularly from the Spanish and the Dutch, while admittedly underestimating other transatlantic connections (to England, Ireland, and Africa) and local innovations. Or there is the international character of fishing on the Newfoundland banks, where Basque, Norman, Breton, and West Country fishermen shared many of the same fish curing techniques, even if some turned more to dry salt cure and others more to wet, depending largely on the market they served. The inhabitants of the seventeenth-century English Shore, on the east coast of Newfoundland, Peter Pope shows, had a mid-Atlantic point of view, with a special relationship to both New England and New France. Newfoundland was a cosmopolitan place which traded with England, Iberia, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic islands, and the Netherlands, as well as New England and New France.24
A third proposition is that key sectors—leading edges—of the Atlantic world deserve singular and sustained attention. The Newfoundland cod fishery is just one. As early as 1580, Pope notes, about 500 ships returned annually from Atlantic Canada to Europe with a catch of about 200,000 metric tons—a level of commercial activity that exceeded, in volume and value, European trade with the Gulf of Mexico, usually considered the American center of gravity of early transatlantic commerce. The cod fishery is just part of the most obvious leading edge of the Atlantic world: the maritime sector itself. We need historical studies of all things maritime, from weather patterns to port cities, from sailors to winds and currents. As Michael Person, who has written a synoptic account of the Indian Ocean, notes, it also will help if such studies contain “a whiff of ozone,” a sense of what it was like to travel by sea, to experience storms, calms, and anchorages. Such a history must also move easily between land and sea; it must be an amphibious history, as it were. In that regard, Daniel Vickers’ Young Men and the Sea is wonderfully apt, since it traces the interrelationships between land and sea from an ideal setting: Salem, Massachusetts, one of the “most thoroughly maritime societies” anywhere around the Atlantic rim, which combined an oceangoing fleet, local fishing, and coastal transport. Emphasizing the ubiquitous and unexceptional character of seafaring—no breed apart, these Yankee mariners—Vickers is also at pains to demonstrate that there was no single maritime culture. “It is fashionable now to speak of the Atlantic basin as a fundamentally international world,” Vickers notes, “but the evidence from Salem suggests that the maritime labor market in much of that world remained deeply parochial.” When most of Salem’s mariners went to sea, they went with neighbors, age was the defining feature, cooperation rather than conflict was the norm, moving up the hierarchical ladder was possible, and they returned home when their sailing days were done.25
Another key sector comprises all the islands that formed way stations, stepping-stones from one hemisphere to the next. The archipelagos of the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde, and the islands of São Tomé, Fernando Po, Príncipe, and Annabon in the Gulf of Guinea assumed special importance in the Atlantic world. These islands were hubs for a series of complex commercial networks; they were points of articulation between North and South Atlantic, North and South America and the Caribbean, Africa and the New World, Africa and Europe, and Europe and America. In his study of the Madeira wine trade—an archetypal Atlantic product that was traded largely across imperial boundaries—David Hancock estimates that in the years spanning 1640 and 1815, the number of ships annually departing Madeira increased twelvefold and they took on cargoes for delivery to scores of ports in North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Another key island was Bermuda, which, despite its tiny size and limited resources, had a bigger fleet than most mainland North American colonies and sat as a crossroads in the age of sail. The Caribbean islands, another crucial vortex, formed the focal point of European overseas expansion in the early modern world, one of the most heterogeneous social mosaics anywhere, and one of the truly great arenas for interpenetration of African, European, American, and later Asian traditions. John Gillis’s Islands of the Mind makes the point that the Atlantic world was one linked by chains of islands, and that from the beginning they were also ideas, mythic islands shining like beacons inspiring mariners to venture across the ocean.26
Finally, borderland areas, transfrontier regions, places where natives and newcomers collided and often none ruled, formed another vector of Atlantic history. Such places gave rise to entangled histories. These marginal areas, frontier zones, leading edges are extensions of the Atlantic world, often far removed from maritime littorals. In the Great Lakes region, a “middle ground” emerged, at least for a time, due to a military and political standoff in which Europeans and Indians searched for “accommodation and common meaning.” Spanish American borderlands were “zones of constant conflict and negotiation over power,” but the terms varied from place to place. In New Mexico, where detribalized Indian captives and slaves comprised almost one-third of society, Spanish society sought to incorporate different native groups in relations bound up in class and race identity. In the vast interior of the American West between the Sierras and the Rocky Mountains, the so-called Great Basin, the easternmost groups, principally bands of Ute Indians, were the first to adopt changing strategies of survival in response to imperial intrusions, often by raiding their neighbors for slaves. In eighteenth-century Texas, Juliana Barr demonstrates, Indians largely dictated the rules, and Native American constructions of social arrangements, defined by gendered terms of kinship, held sway in relations with Spaniards. To Native Americans, Claudio Saunt tartly notes, “middle grounds and borderlands were simply homelands,” and their experiences were less negotiation and compromise than invasion and destruction.27
A fourth proposition is that Atlantic history, which to date has focused primarily on the movement of people and goods, would do well to explore more fully the exchange of values and the circulation of ideas. The balance needs to change—and is changing. One promising line of inquiry is the work of Allan Greer and Kenneth Mills on a Catholic Atlantic, connecting attempts within Europe to Christianize the peasantry—itinerant Jesuits dubbed some regions such as southern Italy “these Indies” or the “other Indies”—with efforts to proselytize natives in the Americas and Africa. As a French Canadianist and a Latin Americanist, their collaboration leads them to appreciate the simultaneous connectedness and autonomy of diverse forms of religious creativity in which indigenous traditions and Christian influences did not so much merge as combine and collide to produce an infinite variety of shifting local variants. More restricted spatially, but also trying to connect both sides of the Atlantic, Dominique Deslandres’s investigation of French mission campaigns links the targeting of the peasants of Brittany and native peoples in Canada. Such work needs to connect to the introduction of Catholicism into Catholic Africa, and then follow that west central African diaspora into the New World.28
Religious networks can be set alongside others, such as the international information exchange of scientific ideas. Simon Schaffer has brilliantly linked the ways in which “making an Atlantic space of reliable pendulum measures,” as part of various Newtonian projects, “was like making an Atlantic space of reliable coin,” as in Robert Boyle’s attempts to make the hydrometer a widely used assay tool. As Schaffer puts it, “in African trading posts, Akan courts, London counting houses, and Whitehall chambers instrumental dramas were used to get temporary workable agreement about [the] value [of gold].” Atlantic science (a capacious term in the early modern period) was very much part of imperial ventures. Commerce and collecting, mapmaking and maritime exploration, mining and metallurgy went hand in hand; early modern naturalists, Londa Schiebinger notes, sought “green gold.” Richard Drayton, for example, has focused on the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and shown how botany and empire developed in tandem. In the creation of Spanish scientific traditions, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra notes, the many metropolitan expeditions and bureaucratic information-gathering campaigns (the relaciones geográficas, the detailed questionnaires submitted to thousands of local authorities) of the Spanish monarchy were vital, but partly in response so were the contributions of patriotic provincial elites, indigenous informants, and entrepreneurial settlers and merchants throughout Spanish America. In the British Atlantic, Susan Scott Parrish argues, provincials and local informants also played essential roles in the development of natural knowledge. Distant from centers of learning, anxious at thoughts of “creolean degeneracy,” colonists took solace in their abilities to observe and report nature accurately.29
Many historians have told the story of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery—the world’s first successful movement for human rights—but few have satisfactorily explained it. Mystery surrounds the expression of human empathy, both its timing and its targeting. Why should a large number of people suddenly have become outraged at the loss of other people’s rights? What galvanized them to translate opinion into action? Christopher Brown’s Moral Capital avoids the false binaries of humanitarian versus hypocrite, of pragmatism versus principle, of selflessness versus self-interest that have often served as previous explanations. Attending to antislavery’s origins and antecedents, Brown makes the point that moral doubts over slavery had a long history. Public disapproval had certainly surfaced by the late seventeenth century; and three local challenges to the morality of slavery occurred in early British America: the attempt to keep slavery out of Georgia in the 1730s, the Quaker expulsion of slave owners in Pennsylvania in the 1760s, and the deterrence against West Indian slaveholders bringing slaves into England in the early 1770s. The key turning point, however, was the American Revolution. It turned the slave system into a symbol, an urgent moral issue. All parties to the imperial contest discovered in slavery an instrument for the validation of their own worth and the denigration of their opponents’ character. “By describing complicity in slavery as proof of collective vice,” Brown shrewdly observes, “disputants in the Revolutionary era helped define opposition to slavery as proof of collective virtue.” It was a way to restore national honor and accumulate “moral capital.” No longer would it be possible to locate the roots of abolitionism in either economic determinism or bourgeois humanitarianism. Rather, the shift from sentiment to action was connected to changing views of empire and nation. That three other nations—Denmark, Haiti, and the United States—ended the slave trade in the first decade of the nineteenth century suggests that British abolitionism was no mere historical accident. Brown’s story needs to be put into a full Atlantic context.30
In the realm of Revolutionary ideas, the urgent requirement is to connect all sides of the Atlantic. For example, two recent approaches within the French Atlantic are pertinent. Emma Rothschild relates how the tragic expedition to French Guyana of 1763–1765 owed much to grandiose, fantastical plans conceived as a way of restoring national honor after the humiliating loss of Canada. The new colony would be a land of enlightenment, not African slavery; it would extend religious tolerance to all, even Jews; it would ensure the freedom of the indigenous population; and it would recruit foreigners, most notably German-speakers. The reality—of 14,000 who embarked, almost all died within a few months—was a catastrophe. The nightmare haunted its victims and its metropolitan promoters. Memories of this exterior, oceanic event invaded interior France, even penetrating remote and mountainous provinces, with ramifications for colonial policy extending into the nineteenth century. Only an integrated French Atlantic can make sense of this event and its repercussions. Similarly, in reflecting on the French Revolutionary era, Laurent Dubois calls for an integrated approach to its intellectual history, bringing together the thoughts and actions of actors on both sides of the Atlantic. For him, debates over the meaning of rights, over universalism, over citizenship reverberate and ricochet back and forth across the ocean. He connects Enlightenment thinkers, colonial administrators, planters, and slaves in a reaction, counterreaction dynamic.31
A fifth proposition is that traditional subjects in imperial history, such as the nature of empire and of the legal systems developed within empires to govern intra-imperial relations as well as to sustain the new colonial regimes overseas, can benefit from examination from a broader perspective. Anthony Pagden’s study of the imperial ideologies Spain, Britain, and France developed to justify the subjugation of indigenous peoples and the occupation of indigenous lands in the Americas and elsewhere between 1500 and 1800 is a case in point. Tracing the roots of those ideologies in classical and Christian discourse, Pagden contrasts the Spanish Empire’s emphasis on conquest, military glory, and the evangelization of indigenous peoples during its first two centuries with the later British and French focus on empire as an instrument for promoting national agricultural, commercial, and demographic resources through settlement of European immigrants in extra-European spaces. Whereas the Spanish “were overwhelmingly concerned with rights over people,” the British and French stressed “rights in things,” mostly in lands.32
From an even wider perspective, Lauren Benton has produced a provocative comparative study of the nature and function of law in the construction of early modern and modern empires. Ranging over a wide number of imperial regimes established between 1500 and 1900, she is mainly concerned to illustrate the emergence of a “global legal regime” evolving out of a transition from the multicentric legal regimes of early modern empires, of which the Spanish Empire serves as her principal example, to the state-dominated and far more unicentric legal regimes of the later nineteenth century, as illustrated by British India and many other cases. Careful not to deny the importance of temporal and spatial variations within and among empires, Benton nonetheless calls attention to the commonalities among imperial legal regimes during the first centuries of political construction, especially the pluralism of those regimes and the degree of indigenous agency in constructing them.33
Although Benton’s emphasis on the pluralism of early modern imperial legal regimes is at odds with the British experience, which within areas of European settlement witnessed a rather rapid substitution of an English common-law regime for indigenous forms of jurisprudence, her emphasis upon subaltern agency accords well with other recent studies stressing the negotiated character of imperial governance in early modern empires.34 Elizabeth Mancke’s many articles reexamining the dynamics of early modern empire formation represent some of the most penetrating work on this subject, and stress the negotiated character of imperial governance and the agency of European settler populations.35
If most of this work derives principally out of the new interest in imperial history and is set within an explicitly imperial context, it is also informed by an Atlantic—and in Benton’s case, a world—perspective. But an Atlantic focus has been fundamental to related work on the interactions among early modern overseas empires. Calling for an “Atlantic history of interstate negotiation” and emphasizing the strong “connection between empire and foreign affairs,” Mancke treats the early modern Atlantic as a contested space more or less continuously involved with the problem of negotiating a “shifting and ambiguous international order” arising out of the spatial complexities of early modern expansion, beginning with the Atlantic. Ostensibly constructed of sovereign and juridically equal states, an increasingly sophisticated, multilateral interstate system developed that, she argues, was fundamentally shaped by overseas expansion. Also concerned with spelling out the international dimensions of the development of the Atlantic empires, Eliga H. Gould, expanding on Benton’s emphasis on the legal pluralism inherent in European expansion, has called for a renewed appreciation of the legal geography of the early modern Atlantic and, more especially, of the emergence of a legal double standard in which Europeans condoned “behavior at a distance that they would have found intolerable on their own doorsteps,” thereby acknowledging that the “extra-European Atlantic” was an entangled “zone of conflicting laws, ecological peril,” racial and cultural diversity, and “chronic violence” in which “no single power” enjoyed a monopoly of legal force. Benefiting from new insights enabled by a broader imperial, Atlantic, or global perspective, these studies of imperial ideology, law, and governance have reopened subjects that we thought we understood well, and provide a fertile field for further scholarly investigation.36
One final proposition is that historians of the Atlantic world must pay close attention to chronology, for sensitivity to time is, after all, the defining characteristic of the historical discipline. The Atlantic world most obviously was not static; it was a place of motion, always in process. Schematic models for conceiving of the development of the Atlantic world seem to come in threes, whether it is Jack Greene’s simplification, elaboration, and replication; Allan Karras and John McNeill’s implantation, maturity, and transitions; Alison Games’s imagination, elaboration, and integration; or Marvin Lunenfeld’s discovery, invasion, and encounter. Moreover, quite obviously a uniform chronology cannot be applied across the entire area; there were no neat divisions that were universal in the Atlantic world. Nevertheless, as Bernard Bailyn points out, there was, “despite all the complexities, at least in rough terms, a common morphology, a general overall pattern, however fluid and irregular, of development and change.” Bailyn offers his own tripartite schema, as does Elliott. A comparison of the two should prove instructive.37
The first phase Bailyn labels an “era of contested marchlands,” whereas Elliott uses the more neutral term “occupation.” For Bailyn, the first stage of development was a time when life was often literally barbarous, when levels of violence were unprecedented, when everything was “fluid, indeterminate, without stable structures, or identities.” It was a time of “pervasive social disorder and disorientation.” Only some remarkable utopian projections redeemed the overall bleakness. Elliott, too, pulls no punches, employing terms such as intrusion, exploitation, devastation, and subjugation. Both British and Spanish empires involved an aggressive European reconstruction and renaming of American spaces, harsh confrontations with indigenous peoples, and economic regimes that resorted to plunder and unfree labor. But the differences between the empires complicate the picture. The Spanish settlement of America rested primarily on the domination of peoples, and the British on the commodification of land. The town became the basis for Spanish dominion, whereas British settlements were overwhelmingly rural. The Spanish, partly because of their long experience of mixing with Moors, practiced cohabitation with Native Americans, whereas the English, in part because of their experience of ostensible segregation in Ireland, excluded Indians. Modes of exploitation and subjugation took varied forms.38
A second stage of development earns the label “integration” from Bailyn and “consolidation” from Elliott. Pan-oceanic commercial webs drew places together, Bailyn notes; increasingly regular networks of trade, trust, and communications emerged. As places within the Atlantic world became more interconnected and interdependent, forms of human action adjusted and gradually came to resemble each other. A growth in internal complexity occurred at the same time as a trend toward outward uniformity. Elliott, too, notes growing imperial integration, particularly among the British, but the Spanish Empire had always exhibited a more sustained effort to achieve centralization of authority, close supervision from the metropolis, and its colonial societies also exhibited a fair measure of underlying unity and homogeneity (from the role of godparenthood as a force of social cohesion to their three-tier social arrangements of Spaniards, castas, and Indians), and a cohesive Roman Catholic establishment and uniformity of faith, at least among the Spanish segments of society. Notwithstanding widespread resistance from both Indians and creoles to metropolitan measures to construct a tightly controlled and integrated empire, metropolitan authority was somewhat stronger during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries than later. Elliott emphasizes that as the bonds of empire grew tighter among the British, they moved in the opposite direction from the Spanish. “The difference,” he argues, “reflected the divergent trajectories of English and Spanish power during the second half of the seventeenth century.” Creole societies in Spanish America gained “new and expanded space for manoeuvre.”39
The last phase is seen by Bailyn and Elliott in similar terms. It was an era of “creole triumphalism,” an age of revolution when new ideals of self-government and freedom from arbitrary power swept across the Atlantic world. Bailyn emphasizes how “reforming plans and programs formed an interactive network,” with new ideas “formulated in one area … picked up in others, assessed and absorbed in varying degrees.” Elliott terms the era one of “emancipation.” He emphasizes “societies on the move,” with rising populations and expanding frontiers; he singles out the mid-century wars for empire and the metropolitan efforts at reform which produced similar imperial crises, leading, finally, to the establishment of independence and efforts at state building. Elliott probes why independence came earlier in North, than in South, America. Partly, it was a matter of space: the Spanish Empire was so sprawling that coordinating resistance was difficult. Partly, it was ideology: British Americans had “a more impressive armoury of ideological weapons” and a more extensive communications network than their Spanish counterparts. Partly, it was social composition: British Americans did not have to hold together coalitions of whites, mestizos, and Indians. And partly, it was a matter of language: the two sides of the Spanish Atlantic spoke different political languages (defenses of the absolutist unitary state versus claims for composite monarchy), which actually allowed for considerable compromise, whereas Britain and British America, “confusingly, and dangerously,” spoke the same language of British liberty and rights, and became “inextricably involved in that most intractable of all forms of conflict, the conflict over competing constitutional rights.”40
These schemas are open to some cavils, particularly if one tries to apply them to the whole Atlantic world. Arguably, the prehistory of the Atlantic deserves a separate stage. If one wanted to pick a year when Atlantic history of the early modern era began (admittedly a highly arbitrary way to proceed), a good case could be made that it should be 1415, with the Portuguese capture of Ceuta in North Africa, or perhaps 1444, when the Atlantic slave trade began, rather than 1492. Others would go further back in time to the Vikings and the exploration of the North Atlantic.41 Furthermore, early colonization was as much backward- as forward-looking. A powerful tendency existed to compare the cultures of the New World with those of classical antiquity. Focusing on stages of development can encourage an appreciation of changes wrought by Europeans at the expense of an emphasis on the cost paid for those changes by indigenous and enslaved people. Also, in the first phase, it is easy to exaggerate levels of violence and disorder, whereas the use of terms such as “peopling” and “occupation” can seem too anodyne. The second stage, the process of settling down, is extremely difficult to encompass: a stress on integration may well overlook the degree of autonomy and disconnectedness of many places, and the term “consolidation” may unconsciously minimize the ever-present volatility and explosiveness. Atlantic Africa is largely ignored in all these schemas, nowhere more so than in the last phase, whether labeled “revolution” or “emancipation.” Emancipation and revolution must grapple with those places in the Atlantic world, most notably Africa and large parts of the Caribbean, where colonialism deepened rather than weakened.42
One last problem deserves consideration here: the temporal boundaries of Atlantic history. Most practitioners seem content to limit the subject matter of Atlantic history to the long period between the European Atlantic discoveries of the fifteenth century and the beginnings of decolonization in the Americas between 1774 and 1825. They see it as essentially ending with the creation of new independent nation-states in the Americas following the American Revolution and the Hispanic American wars for independence, the creation of more powerful centralized national states in Europe during and in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the powerful turn of European imperialism toward the east during the nineteenth century. The presumption seems to be that the expansion of European imperialism and the spread of commerce after 1800 make a global framework of more utility than an Atlantic one for those who are not content to continue to operate within traditional national and imperial frameworks.
Such limits and considerations aside, however, the Atlantic world constructed during the early modern era continued to exhibit considerable vitality throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. The Atlantic slave trade did not completely end until the 1880s, and European immigration to the Americas increased steadily throughout the nineteenth century. As the volume of transatlantic shipping increased and sailing times declined in the nineteenth century, commercial, cultural, and political relationships between Europe and the new nations in America strengthened to the point of cordiality, confirming historic ties. Europe’s interactions with Africa did not decrease, but became even more vigorous during the late nineteenth century, following the fuller colonization of the continent. Wherever the Atlantic remains a vital, even privileged arena of exchange among the four continents surrounding it, Atlantic history can still be a useful tool of analysis.43
This introduction provides a brief and highly selective survey of the burgeoning literature in Atlantic history, and offers guarded enthusiasm for Atlantic history and a few guidelines for how it might best be approached. The thirteen chapters that follow are intended to provide a current survey and to offer critical evaluations of Atlantic history. In chapter 1, Joyce Chaplin analyzes contemporary understandings of the ocean that over the course of the early modern era would come to be known as the Atlantic. We have divided the remaining twelve chapters into three parts.
Some historians have embraced the Atlantic approach as an instrument for breaking down the national boundaries that tended to contain traditional imperial history approaches, but, notwithstanding all the boundary-crossing identified by such historians, the fact remains that contemporaries tended to think of what we now call the Atlantic world as a series of national and competitive spheres of activity in which the language of authority, the system of law, and modes of governance, land occupation, and even religious orientation followed distinctly national lines. Part I, “New Atlantic Worlds,” consists of discussions of the five most prominent national Atlantics that Europeans and their auxiliaries created between the end of the fifteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century: Kenneth Andrien, treating the Spanish Atlantic; A. J. R. Russell-Wood, the Portuguese Atlantic; Trevor Burnard, the British Atlantic; Laurent Dubois, the French Atlantic; and Benjamin Schmidt, the Dutch Atlantic. These were not, of course, the only European states to participate in the creation of the early modern Atlantic. But they were the principal colonizing powers, all establishing major enclaves of settlement and trade in the Americas and participating heavily in the slave and other African trades. The Swedes and the Danes were also involved in the African trade, but their settlements in the Americas were small and, in the Swedish case, short-lived, and the Russian settlements in northwestern North America never had an Atlantic dimension. These five national chapters focus on four overlapping questions: (1) What is distinctive and what is general about the particular national Atlantic under consideration? (2) Has the growing use of the Atlantic concept produced any advances in our understanding of the nations’ activities in the Atlantic or put those activities in a broader perspective that facilitates deeper understanding of them and their distinctiveness? (3) Are there additional questions that might be usefully pursued by historians using an Atlantic perspective? (4) Do we lose anything in the process of incorporating a national Atlantic into the greater Atlantic?
Of course, the emergence of the Atlantic world not only led to the creation of new national Atlantics; it also profoundly altered the Old Worlds of Europe, Africa, and the indigenous Americas. The three chapters of Part II, “Old Worlds and the Atlantic,” endeavor to sketch out the differential impact of the new Atlantic world on the old societies bordering on and connected to the Atlantic Ocean, as that impact varied over space and time. In chapter 7, Amy Turner Bushnell looks at Indian societies in both the Americas to analyze those factors that both facilitated cultural and social change in some Indian societies and enabled some to domesticate, and still others to resist such change until long after the early modern era. In chapter 8, Philip D. Morgan looks broadly at Africa’s growing involvement with the Atlantic, beginning in the fifteenth century, assessing the impact of the expanding trade in slaves and other goods upon African societies and sketching the extensive role of the African diaspora in shaping the early modern Atlantic world. Both Bushnell and Morgan stress, respectively, Indian and African agency in these developments. In chapter 9, Carla Rahn Phillips takes a selective approach to the complex problem of the impact of Atlantic expansion upon Europe, focusing particularly on the political and economic ramifications of that expansion and using the Iberian experience as illustrative.
Part III, “Competing and Complementary Perspectives,” considers alternative frameworks for understanding those aspects of early modern development that Atlanticists have so far neglected. Using North America as a case study, Peter H. Wood, in chapter 10, explores the tensions between an Atlantic and a multicultural view of the North American past. Advocating a continental approach to the history of the Americas, he emphasizes the importance of a perspective deriving out of developments in the middle and western portions of the North American continent, most of which, by the close of the early modern period, still remained under indigenous control. In chapter 11, Jack P. Greene proposes an American hemispheric approach as the most promising avenue toward constructing an understanding of developments within the New Worlds of the Americas and as a device for promoting both an appreciation of the variations among and within those worlds and the comparative history of them. Nicholas Canny considers the merits of a global approach in chapter 12. Subjecting some of the more important recent work from that perspective to a critical analysis, he also makes a preliminary effort to classify the many varieties of Atlantic history that have emerged over recent decades. In chapter 13, Peter Coclanis explores the limits of the Atlantic approach, advocating a global perspective that emphasizes the extent to which developments in the early modern Atlantic both derived from and were connected to those in the Indian Ocean, China, and the Pacific. He puts particular stress on global circuits of trade and articulation of production models to build the case for what he calls a “Conjuncto-Atlantic history.” As comprehensive as this book is, the editors had hoped, if space had permitted, to include a chapter in this last part assessing the utility of the new imperial history (or the imperial turn) as an alternative framework for studying European overseas activities both in and beyond the Atlantic during the early modern era. To an important extent, however, the chapters in part I cover at least some of this ground.
Whatever its defects, the expanding subject of the Atlantic world represents a lively and exciting approach to the study of the changes that occurred on and around the Atlantic Ocean. If Atlantic history was initially designed as a perspective that would avoid the teleologies of United States and other national histories, it has already done far more. By raising historical discussions of the Atlantic world to a level that transcends both nations and empires, it has contributed to the development of analytical procedures for describing experiences and connections that were multiracial, multiethnic, multinational, and multi-imperial; it has provided students of small or marginalized groups and places with a broader context that offers the possibility of escaping from the parochialism formerly associated with such studies; and it has stimulated efforts to construct a coherent narrative. We have endeavored to present some of the rich variety of approaches and controversies that the Atlantic perspective has so far generated. No doubt, other avenues of analysis will emerge in the bold quest to comprehend the Atlantic world.
1. John Elliott, “Afterword. Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 233–249, esp. 239.
2. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Knopf, 1947); Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969); Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communications and Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986); D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 1: Atlantic America 1492–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986).
3. Jacques Godechot, Histoire de l’Atlantique (Paris: Bordas, 1947); Leonard Outhwaite, The Atlantic (New York: Coward-McCann, 1957).
4. The early genealogy of an Atlantic perspective, which has political as well as scholarly origins, has been well traced by Bernard Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 20 (1996): 9–44, which in revised form can be found in his Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 3–56. For a similar account, see William O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic History,” Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 66–84.
5. For twenty years until 1990, when it evolved into the Global Center for the Study of Power, Culture, and History, the Johns Hopkins Program in Atlantic History and Culture engaged the attention not just of the historians and anthropologists who organized and presided over it, but also of a number of other social scientists, ranging from sociologists to economists, geographers, and social psychologists who were concerned with the histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas, especially in the early modern era. The program, which always had a powerful tilt toward the South Atlantic, sponsored a heavy round of visiting scholars, seminars, and conferences; created a book series, Studies in Atlantic History and Culture, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, that provided an outlet for some of the best work in the field (the first book in the series was issued in 1979); and helped to attract some outstanding doctoral students, three of whom are contributors to this volume. Between 1974 and 2000, 102 historians and 21 anthropologists associated with the Atlantic Program earned doctorates at Johns Hopkins. If the faculty involved in the program had to learn, as they constructed it, that they were Atlanticists and what that term implied, the large number of students who participated in it were Atlanticists from the start of their studies.
6. In 2000 the American Historical Association hosted a session at its Chicago meeting which explored “The Atlantic World: Emerging Themes in a New Teaching Field”; five years later, the subject was apparently mature enough to merit “A Critical Reassessment,” the title of a panel discussion at the meeting in Seattle. In all, the Seattle meeting sponsored nine sessions featuring Atlantic history or the Atlantic world; in the most recent meeting (2007), the number of sessions had grown to eleven. Since 1998, the organization has also offered an annual prize for the best book in Atlantic history.
7. H-Atlantic has discussion logs, reviews, syllabi, bibliography, and links. The special issues or forums were Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 48–173 (“Round Table: The Nature of Atlantic History”); Dix-huitième Siècle no. 33 (2001): 7–316 (“L’Atlantique”); Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 29, no. 1 (2003): 1–188 (“Slavery and Citizenship in the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions”); and William and Mary Quarterly [hereafter, WMQ] 3rd ser., LVI, no. 2 (1999): 241–414 (“African and American Atlantic Worlds”); LVIII no. 1 (2001), pp. 3–251 (“New Perspectives on the Transatlantic Slave Trade”); LIX, no. 3 (2002): 551–696 (“Slaveries in the Atlantic World”); LXIII, no. 4 (2006): 675–742 (“Beyond the Atlantic”); and American Historical Review [hereafter, AHR] 111 (2006): 717–780 (“Oceans of History”). New book series include New World in the Atlantic World (Routledge); The Americas in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Palgrave); Atlantic Studies on Society in Change (Columbia University Press); The Atlantic World: Europe, Africa, and the Americas, 1500–1830 (Brill); Atlantic Cultural Studies (Lit Verlag); and The Carolina Low Country and the Atlantic World (University of South Carolina Press). The textbook is Douglas R. Egerton, Alison Games, Jane G. Landers, Kris Lane, and Donald R. Wright., The Atlantic World: A History, 1400–1888 (Wheeling, Ill.: Harlan Davidson, 2007); and a new anthology is Alison Games and Adam Rothman, eds., Major Problems in Atlantic History: Documents and Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).
8. http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic has, among other things, a list of seminars and workshops, working paper abstracts, dissertation abstracts, and a bibliography. Bernard Bailyn established the Atlantic History Seminar at Harvard University, under the auspices of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has committed funding at least through 2010. By my count, confirmed in helpful discussions with Pat Denault, the 12 international seminars (from 1996 to 2007) have discussed 320 papers; the anniversary conference of 2005, another 82; and the 18 workshops, 136 (although most of these were “talks”)—for a grand total of about 540 papers or presentations.
9. These include New York University, which instituted its Atlantic World Workshop in 1997; the McNeill Center for the Study of Early America at the University of Pennsylvania, which offered its first Atlantic Seminar in 2004; and a joint University of Virginia and Oxford University video-conference-linked Atlantic World Colloquium, which began in 2005. To the best of our knowledge, at least six U.S. universities—Florida International University, Michigan State University, New York University, Rutgers University (graduate study in African-American history and the history of Atlantic cultures and the African diaspora), SUNY–Buffalo (North and South Atlantic history), and the University of Texas at Arlington—offer graduate degrees in Atlantic history, and others facilitate informal fields in Atlantic history. Both the University of Liverpool and the University of Essex in England offer MAs in Atlantic history. A French Atlantic history 1500–1830 group is active at McGill University and the University of Montreal in Canada. The scholarly organization the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction has also been active in promoting Atlantic history, even if, as its moniker suggests, it is devoted to a conception both more limited (privileging Europe) and more expansive (prioritizing the global) than the Atlantic basin alone. See www.feegi.org. See also the journal Itinerario, associated with FEEGI as its subtitle European Journal of Overseas History suggests, which has published important work in Atlantic history.
10. Pierre Chaunu and Huguette Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, vol. 8 (part 1), p. xiii, as cited in Bailyn, Atlantic History, p. 31; Meinig, Atlantic America, p. 65; Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, The World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13 (2002): 169–182 (quote on p. 170).
11. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 14, 17; Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study in Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); and the same authors’ “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology,’” AHR 111, no 3 (2006): 722–740.
12. Elliott, “Afterword,” in Armitage and Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, p. 234; “Round Table: The Nature of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 48–173; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
13. William O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic history,” Atlantic Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 66–84; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, “Some Caveats about the ‘Atlantic’ Paradigm,” History Compass, http://www.history-compass.com.
14. Paul W. Mapp, “Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives,” WMQ LXIII, no. 4 (2006): 713–724.
15. Elliott, “Afterword, in Armitage and Braddick, eds., The British Atlantic World, p. 237. For a useful set of essays on comparative history, see Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004).
16. David Eltis, “Atlantic History in Global Perspective,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (1999): 141; Meinig, Atlantic America, p. 64.
17. Martin W. Lewis, “Dividing the Ocean Sea,” Geographical Review 89 (April 1999): 188–214.
18. William H. McNeill, “Transatlantic History in World Perspective,” in Steven G. Reinhardt and Dennis Reinhartz, eds., Transatlantic History (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006), pp. 3–18; Pier M. Larson, “African Diasporas and the Atlantic,” in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, 1500–1800 (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), pp. 129–148. Fitting the Atlantic into larger contexts is also the focus of the forum “Beyond the Atlantic,” WMQ LXIII, no. 4 (2006): 675–742; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 42, 44–45.
19. Mapp, “Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives,” pp. 713–724.
20. Bailyn, Atlantic History, p. 60; Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World 1570–1670 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); T. M. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, 1600–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2003); Tamar Herzog, Defining Nations: Immigrants and Citizens in Early Modern Spain and Spanish America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). See also Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire: The Making of a World 1492–1763 (London: Allen Lane, 2002), in which the argument is that Castile did not create the Spanish Empire, but rather that the Empire made Spain.
21. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. xvi, 247, 250. For another comparative study—only partly Atlantic in scope—see David Ormrod, The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Bob Moore and Henk Van Nierop, eds., Colonial Empires Compared: Britain and the Netherlands, 1750–1850 (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2003).
22. Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: The Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972); Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985); Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Walker, 1997); Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Walker, 2002); Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe, The True History of Chocolate (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996); Cameron L. McNeil, ed., Chocolate in Mesoamerica: A Cultural History of Cacao (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007); Jordan Goodman; Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London: Routledge 1993); Tim Ecott, Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid (New York: Grove, 2004); Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Stuart B. Schwartz, ed., Tropical Babylon: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For commodity studies that will become monographs, see Jennifer Anderson, “Nature’s Currency: The Atlantic Mahogany Trade, 1725–1825” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2007); Michelle Craig McDonald, “From Cultivation to Cup: Caribbean Coffee and the North American Economy, 1765–1805” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 2005); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate, 1492–1700 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 2008); and Molly Warsh, “Adorning Empire: The History of the Pearl Trade, 1492–1688” (Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2009).
23. Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624–1783 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); the only other study of hurricanes is confined to one island and to a later century: Louis A. Pérez, Jr., Winds of Change: Hurricanes and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the Crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492–1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 5, 65, 95. For other recent studies of diasporic, border-crossing communities, see Bertrand Van Ruymbeke and Randy Sparks, eds., Memory and Identity: The Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003); Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World, 1750–1820 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2005); Alexia Grosjean and Steve Murdoch, eds., Scottish Communities Abroad in the Early Modern Period (Leiden: Brill, 2005); and Van Ruymbeke, From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).
24. Nicholas Canny, “Atlantic History, 1492–1700: Scope, Sources, and Methods,” in Horst Pietschmann, ed., Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580–1830 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), pp. 55–64; April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). For further examples of seeing Virginia in larger Atlantic and global contexts, see Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet, eds., Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Peter Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–16241 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); L. H. Roper, “Charles I, Virginia, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Itinerario 30, no. 2 (2006): 33–53; and Peter E. Pope, Fish Into Wine: The Newfoundland Plantation in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
25. Peter Pope, “Comparisons: Atlantic Canada,” in Daniel Vickers, ed., A Companion to Colonial America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 489–507; Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (London: Routledge, 2003); Daniel Vickers with Vince Walsh, Young Men and the Sea: Yankee Seafarers in the Age of Sail (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 60, 129 (quotes). For other portraits of life at sea, see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Pablo E. Pérez-Mallaína, Spain’s Men of the Sea: Daily Life on the Indies Fleet in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Carla Rahn Philipps (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Paul A. Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Bernhardt Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean (New York, 2004); Daniel Finamore, ed., Maritime History as World History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jerry Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen, eds., Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007); Carla Rahn Phillips, The Treasure of the San José: Death at Sea in the War of the Spanish Succession (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
26. David Hancock, Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Organization of the Atlantic Market, 1640–1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Michael Jarvis, At the Crossroads of the Atlantic: Maritime Revolution and the Transformation of Bermuda, 1612–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); Philip D. Morgan, “The Caribbean Islands in Atlantic Context, circa 1500–1800,” in Felicity A. Nussbaum, ed., The Global Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 52–64; John R. Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave, 2004). See also Stephen A Royle, A Geography of Islands: Small Island Insularity (London: Routledge, 2001); Ileana Rodríguez, Transatlantic Topographies: Islands, Highlands, Jungles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Lauren Benton, “Spatial Histories of Empire,” Itinerario 30, no. 3 (2006): 19–34. Most of the studies of Atlantic islands are somewhat old; there is much opportunity for new work here.
27. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republic in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Donna J. Guy and Thomas E. Sheridan, eds., Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998), p. 4; Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” AHR 104, no. 3 (1999): 814–840; James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Jesús de la Teja and Frank Ross, eds., Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on Spain’s North American Frontiers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 2006); Juliana Barr, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Claudio Saunt, “‘Our Indians’: European Empires and the History of the Native American South,” in Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, pp. 61–75 (quote on p. 61).
28. Allan Greer and Kenneth Mills, “A Catholic Atlantic,” in Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History, pp. 3–20; Dominique Deslandres, “Dans les Amériques,” in Jean-Marie Mayeur et al., gen. eds., Histoire du Christianisme dès origins à nos jours, vol. 9: L’Age de Raison (1620/30–1750), Marc Venard, ed. (Paris: Fayard, 1997), Troisième partie, “Le Christianisme dans le monde,” ch. 1, pp. 616–736; and Deslandres, Croire et faire croire: Les missions française au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2003); John Thornton, “The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491–1750,” Journal of African History 25 (1984): 147–167; and John Thornton and Linda Heywood, Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also Nicholas Griffiths and Fernando Cervantes, eds., Spiritual Encounters: Interactions Between Christianity and Native Religions in Colonial America (Birmingham, U.K.: University of Birmingham Press, 1999); Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, eds., Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2003); Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds., Conversions: Old Worlds and New (Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2003); James Muldoon, ed., The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004); Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests, and Demons: Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World and the New (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Margaret Cormack, ed., Saints and Their Cults in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007). Unfortunately, Elaine G. Breslaw, ed., Witches of the Atlantic World: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook (New York: New York University Press, 2000), is too New England-centered to be fully an Atlantic reader. For some recent work on Moravians, see Elizabeth W. Sommer, Serving Two Masters: Moravian Brethren in Germany and North Carolina, 1727–1801 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000); Jon F. Sensbach, Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Aaron Fogleman, Jesus Is Female: Moravians and Radical Religion in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Michelle Gillespie and Robert Beachy, eds., Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007).
29. Simon Schaffer, “Golden Means: Assay Instruments and the Geography of Precision in the Guinea Trade,” in Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Christian Licoppe, and H. Otto Sibum, eds., Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries of Precision from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 20–50; Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 7; Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006); Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). See also Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Chiyo Ishikawa, ed., Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492–1819 (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2004), pp. 139–227; James Delbourgo, A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006); Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); and James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2008).
30. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 153. Brown mentions most of the previous relevant historiography. For another approach to the subject of antislavery, see Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).
31. Emma Rothschild, “A Horrible Tragedy in the French Atlantic,” Past and Present no. 192 (August 2006): 67–108; Laurent Dubois, “An Enslaved Enlightenment: Re-thinking the Intellectual History of the French Atlantic,” Social History 31, no. 1 (2006): 1–14.
32. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 78–79. More intensively, David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), explores this subject for the British Empire within an explicitly Atlantic framework.
33. Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey, eds., New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), is an interesting collection of case studies of the ways officials and settlers used the provincial and local legal regimes they created to demarcate economic, social, political, and cultural boundaries and to reinforce their own claims to authority and status.
34. See, for instance, Mary Sarah Bilder, The Transatlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); Daniel J. Hulsebosch, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Jack P. Greene, “The Cultural Dimensions of Political Transfers: An Aspect of the European Occupation of the Americas,” Early American Studies 8 (2008): 1–26.
35. See, for instance, Elizabeth Mancke, “Negotiating an Empire: Britain and Its Oversea Peripheries, c. 1550–1780,” in Christine Daniels and Michael J. Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires: Centers and Peripheries in the Americas, 1500–1820 (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 235–265. The volume in which this essay appears contains chapters on all of the five most important early modern European empires in the Americas. See also Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities: The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Greene, Negotiated Authorities: Essays in Colonial and Political History (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), pp. 1–24.
36. See Elizabeth Mancke, “Empire and State,” in Armitage and Braddick, eds., British Atlantic World, pp. 175–195 (quotations from pp. 176–177, 188); and Mancke, Spatially Radical Empires: European Expansion and the Making of Modern Geopolitics (forthcoming); Eliga H. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, Circa 1772,” WMQ 3d ser., LX (2003): 471–510 (quotations from p. 509); Eliga H. Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” AHR 112 (2007): 764–786; and Gould, Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The American Revolution and the Legal Geography of the Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
37. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Alan L. Karras and J. R. McNeill, eds., Atlantic American Societies: From Columbus Through Abolition, 1492 to 1888 (London: Routledge, 1992); Alison Games, “Teaching Atlantic History,” Itinerario 23 (1999): 162–173; Marvin Lunenfeld, ed., 1492, Discovery, Invasion, Encounter: Sources and Interpretation (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1991); Bailyn, Atlantic History, p. 62.
38. Bailyn, Atlantic History, pp. 62–81 (quotes on pp. 68–69, 70); Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic, pp. 1–114. Elliott later notes that Spanish immigrants were generally uninfected by egalitarian and communitarian ideals; for him, Protestant sectarians generated most of the utopian experiments of the New World (pp. 154–155).
39. Bailyn, Atlantic History, pp. 81–101; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic, pp. 115–251, esp. pp. 223–224, 231. For a bracing argument against the notion of economic integration, see Pieter Emmer, “The Myth of Early Globalization: The Atlantic Economy, 1500–1800,” European Review 11, no. 1 (2003): 37–47.
40. Bailyn, Atlantic History, pp. 101–111, esp. pp. 104–105; Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic, pp. 253–402, esp. pp. 319, 324, 329.
41. For a range of opinion, see Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “Atlantic Exploration Before Columbus,” in G. R. Winius, ed., Portugal the Pathfinder (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 41–70; R.W. Unger, “Portuguese Shipbuilding and the Early Voyages to the Guinea Coast,” in Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ed., The European Opportunity (Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, 1995), pp. 43–64; Karen Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America, c. A.D. 1000–1500 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “Spanish Atlantic Voyages and Conquests Before Columbus,” in J. B. Hattendorf, ed., Maritime History, vol. 1: The Age of Discovery (Malabar, Fla.: Krieger, 1996), pp. 137–147; Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “The Origins of the European Atlantic,” Itinerario 24, no. 1 (2000): 111–128; Peter Russell, Prince Henry “the Navigator”: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Barry Cunliffe, Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC-AD 1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
42. David A. Lupher, Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003); Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). For other such studies, see Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1971), pp. 71–137; Michael T. Ryan, “Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 519–538; Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance to the Regency (London: Thames and Hudson 1989); John F. Moffitt and Santiago Sebastián, O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), ch.5; Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), ch. 6.
43. Donna Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in a Wider World,” Atlantic Studies 1 (2004): 1–27.