Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580–1830

Abstract

Don’t be fooled by this book’s title; it cannot justly claim to be anything approaching a history of the Atlantic system. This collection of 29 essays grew out of a 1999 conference in Hamburg. The context in which the volume was generated is important, as it explains the collection’s contents. Participants, for example, had to give papers in English or French. The location of the conference generated many essays on German-speaking people and their experiences in the Atlantic, itself a welcome realignment of conventional approaches to Atlantic history. The volume’s scope thus reflects not a coherent effort to engage different aspects of Atlantic history in a systematic fashion, but instead the participation of people who responded to the initial call for papers and those distinguished scholars who were invited to take part. The circumstances of publication further shaped the volume. No author was excluded, aside from those who excluded themselves or who could not prepare an adequate typescript. Moreover, there were no funds for a copy editor. The result is a profoundly uneven collection encumbered by grammatical errors, missing documentation, and stylistic inconsistencies. The editor’s introduction does not help the reader to integrate the individual essays, because it neglects to discuss explicitly the larger themes of the volume or any individual contributions.The essays range enormously in quality. The contributions of several distinguished scholars are worthwhile, although in some instances very similar to pieces already published elsewhere. Nicholas Canny’s essay on the scope, sources, and methods of Atlantic history offers an excellent introduction to the field. James Muldoon offers a nice comparative framework in “Christendom, the Americas, and World Order.” Pieter Emmer’s provocative essay, “In Search of a System: The Atlantic Economy, 1500-1800,” argues that, by economic measures, there was no “Atlantic System” and that the economic impact of that system on Europe was meager. Instead, Emmer insists that the Atlantic system, such as it was, revolved around cultural values. Herbert Klein offers a useful synthesis of slave-trade historiography through 1999. Robin Law’s essay on the Port of Ouidah is particularly noteworthy and should be of special interest to historians of the south Atlantic. Law’s essay is exemplary in its approach to Atlantic history, particularly its insistence “on the continuous involvement of Africans . . . in trans-oceanic exchanges” (p. 350): in this instance, the migration of Brazilians and Afro-Brazilians to Ouidah and the enduring cultural impact of this community there. He offers a refreshing critique of the limits of the Black Atlantic as delineated by Paul Gilroy. Finally, Kenneth Morgan’s essay on the impact of slavery and Atlantic trade on the eighteenth-century British economy revisits a familiar debate, but it does so carefully and thoughtfully, urging readers to eschew an insistence on quantifiable measurements only and instead to consider a range of economic impacts.Four relatively junior scholars contributed strong essays. Ursula Appelt’s “Ethnographic Economies: The Role of Cultural Comparison in English Economic Tracts of the Early Seventeenth Century” employs a method of examining economic tracts for ethnographic purposes that is well worth replicating in other contexts. Claudia Schnurmann explores Dutch and English relations in the seventeenth century and suggests the value of investigating imperial powers in tandem instead of in isolation. William O’Reilly and Christine Hucho contribute innovative essays based on original research on German-speaking migrants.Only seven of the essays (Robin Law’s is the best of the lot) deal with the Ibe-rian Atlantic world. This might seem inadequate to HAHR readers and to those who study the Atlantic in general. These essays privilege economic history (Marina Alfonso Mola on the fleet system, Manuel Bustos Rodríguez on Cádiz, Carlos Martínez Shaw on trade and the Bourbon reforms, Eugenio Pinero on cacao production and household configurations, and Nikolaus Böttcher on Cuba’s trade during the American War for Independence). The two exceptions are Alberto Vieira on the Atlantic islands and Josefina Zoraida Vázquez on Mexican nationalism and the Atlantic revolutions, which offers a refreshing attempt to put Mexico (whose revolution is generally overlooked by scholars of the North Atlantic) into the general narrative of revolution in the Atlantic world. Latin Americanists might be pleasantly surprised to discover an affinity between Argentina and Iceland in the early nineteenth century: Anna Agnarsdottir’s essay on Britain’s efforts to annex Iceland during the Napoleanic Wars offers a fascinating counterfoil to simultaneous British efforts in Buenos Aires.Although, as noted above, there are several excellent essays in this volume and each essay contains a helpful bibliography, on the whole readers would be well served looking elsewhere for new scholarship on the Atlantic world.