A long Atlantic in a wider world

Abstract

In the 1990s, the geographical conceit of the Atlantic as a watery site of cross-cultural exchange and struggles gained wide enough currency to alter teaching and research on Africa, Europe, and the Americas, at least for the years between 1500 and 1800. This paper examines the possibilities for analyzing a longer history of the Atlantic—one that conceivably reaches into our own times. Key to creating a periodization for this longer Atlantic is the changing place of the Atlantic in the wider world. Interpretations of the Atlantic as a separate or central “world” in the years before 1800 are collapsing in the face of global perspectives. The paper summarizes a considerable literature on the Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century that complements in surprising ways the work on red, black and white Atlantic in earlier centuries. This literature also reveals little-known and multi-disciplinary roots of the emerging field of Atlantic Studies. Although the usefulness of Atlantic analyses become more problematic for historians of the “American century,” analyses of red, black and white Atlantic continue to have some salience for the era of NATO and American global hegemony.