'ReCapricorning' the Atlantic

Abstract

The lead section of this LBR volume brings together four articles on the Lusophone South Atlantic by historians of Africa and Brazil originally presented to the Michigan State University and University of Michigan’s Atlantic History workshop “ReCapricorning the Atlantic: Luso-Brazilian and Luso-African Perspectives on the Atlantic World.”  Th e workshop and this special volume’s title is a twist on Andre Gunder Frank’s Re Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) in which the renowned economic historian argued that Asia had been the hub of the global economy through the early modern period and that a Johnnycome-lately Europe “used its American money to buy itself a ticket on the Asian train” aft er 1800 to “temporarily” become the new hub of global trade (p. xxv). Frank’s interest in Asia’s role in the global economy was a signifi cant departure from his earlier work which had focused on exploring Portuguese and Spanish America’s underdevelopment within the frameworks of dependency and world systems theory. “ReCapricorning the Atlantic” returns to the site of Frank’s earlier work to consider a similar reorientation based on perspectives centered around the Tropic of Capricorn within a body of scholarship that has come to be known as “Atlantic History.” Th e South Atlantic was the economic hub and arguably the most signifi cant formative matrix of the early modern European colonial enterprise in Africa and the Americas. Yet to date, most Atlantic history has focused on the British and to a somewhat lesser extent, French Empires and their remnants in the Americas and Africa. Th is “North Atlantic-centrism” is refl ected in many classic titles in Atlantic History that conceal their much more limited geographic emphases in terms of primary research (e.g., David Eltis, Th e Rise of African Slavery in the Americas; Paul Gilroy, Th e Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, or David Brion Davis, Th e Problem of Slavery in Western Culture). With these legacies in mind, workshop participants set out to “ReCapricorn the Atlantic” by assessing how new research on the Lusophone South Atlantic modifi es, challenges, or confi rms major