Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution by Geoffrey Plank

Abstract

Reviewed by: Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution by Geoffrey Plank Michael A. McDonnell Atlantic Wars: From the Fifteenth Century to the Age of Revolution. By Geoffrey Plank. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 338 pages. Cloth, ebook. Over the last three decades, a generation of scholars have turned to Atlantic history as a means to transcend the limitations of national and imperial borders. Recognizing the extraordinary array of fresh relationships that developed beginning in the early fifteenth century, historians have rushed to examine the many and diverse interactions, connections, and commonalities across Africa, Europe, and the Americas in the early modern world. European empires still loom large in these works, but researchers have striven to recover the full range of levers driving the creation and maintenance of a coherent Atlantic world from the Age of Exploration to the Age of Revolution. Through this work, they have produced rich and complex studies of trade, migration, mobilities, cultural interactions, and the exchange of ideas, illuminating a dynamic web of relations enmeshing the peoples, products, beliefs, and ecosystems of the Atlantic. In his expansive and ambitious Atlantic Wars, Geoffrey Plank builds on this literature to draw attention to another important element at work—the formative influence of war. In doing so, he makes more explicit one of the themes raised by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra—that violence was at the heart of the Atlantic world.1 Indeed, Atlantic Wars makes the bold but compelling claim that warfare and violence were not only central to the creation of the Atlantic world but shaped the experiences of the peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas perhaps more than any other factor. Beginning with the skirmishing on European coastlines and seas in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, conflict and violence were endemic to maritime ventures and also at the heart of European expansion, fueling colonial ventures, imperial ambitions, and the Atlantic slave trade for three hundred years. The tendrils of oceanic warfare also reached deep into the continental land masses, as naval developments increasingly facilitated the movement of warriors and soldiers who brought violence and terror to the lives of millions and disrupted and reconfigured the sociopolitical geography of the Atlantic world. Writing for historians and a wider public, Plank draws on an impressive array of both primary and secondary sources to tell an engaging—if depressing—story of the many different peoples enmeshed in this Atlantic world of warfare. The first two parts of the book survey the lives of the diverse, evolving, [End Page 345] and polyglot group of Atlantic sailors and the challenges they faced, their many kinds of contact and conflict with coastal peoples around the Atlantic, and the projection of violence, terror, and warfare on land. Plank gives us a layered, multifaceted story of a developing Atlantic way of warfare. He is also careful to fold the Atlantic slave trade and slavery itself into the story as a critical component of the spread of interconnected violence, as conflict in West Africa—both between Africans and between Europeans and Africans—shaped the nature of the slave trade in the Americas. Put bluntly, as Plank does: "Violent conflict was intrinsic to slavery, embedded in its origins and part of its operations" (198). One of the great strengths of Atlantic Wars is its weaving of the micro and the macro—from stories of people entangled in warfare to the broader patterns and meanings that emerged from the violence. In the earlier chapters, Plank elaborates the brutal details of fishing wars, coastal raids, kidnappings, shipboard violence, and desperate and bloody maritime and coastal struggles from Boston to Buenos Aires and from the Senegal River to the Saint Lawrence. From this welter of richly detailed stories, Plank builds a case that the forging of an interconnected Atlantic world was predicated on these disparate and seemingly random conflicts. Starting with maritime conflict on the Baltic, the North Sea, and the Mediterranean, Plank outlines the technological changes in shipbuilding and naval warfare that facilitated local and regional commerce even while spreading violence. The growth of these trade networks, moreover, allowed European nations a measure...