Atlantic History and Interdisciplinary Approaches

Abstract

ERIC Slauter has taken an inventive approach to two difficult and important questions: how do historians and literary scholars make sense of each other's work, and how can we spark more satisfactory conversations among ourselves? I am grateful to him for the thoughtful analysis he has provided and for encouraging me to consider what interdis ciplinary work may contribute to the study of the world. Carrying on a long tradition of early American scholarship, Slauter has constructed a declension thesis, one in which a field formerly reliant on literary approaches has fallen off. He asserts, for example, that Atlantic history as a whole is apparently moving away from a focus on text-centered evidence. Yet was the field ever so text centered as he sug gests? Slauter identifies Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden's Colonial Identity in the World as a crucial, agenda-setting text for com parative studies and points to this collection's literary and cultural approach. I am a big fan of these essays, but we should acknowledge that the volume's strengths lie in its examination of colonial elites in the western Atlantic. It does not have much to say about Africa or early modern Europe (apart from Ireland), nor does it take us deep into the structure of colonial societies. And though it is certainly true that in the 1980s many historians, inspired largely by the scholarship of cultural anthropologists such as Clifford Geertz, turned to cultural approaches, it was also still an era of social history, as studies that preceded Canny and Pagden's collection indicate. history's origins reflect the period's multiple strands of inquiry. When I consider the field's beginnings, I think of works such as Philip D. Curtin's heroic effort to calculate the scope of the slave trade in The Slave Trade or his powerful synthesis The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Another crucial text came from the field of historical geography: D. W Meinig's The Shaping of America.1 These books mapped out?in