The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History

Abstract

The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, ed. Joseph C. Miller; assoc. ed. Vincent Brown, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Laurent Dubois, and Karen Ordahl Kupperman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. xxvi + 532 pp.IF YOU LEARNT HISTORY AS I DID, IN THE IMMEDIATE aftermath of colonialism, what you learnt was still a Eurocentric history with additional flavourings of black resistance and a world wider than Europe. Ideas of Afrocentricity, or Asiacentricity for that matter, were only just beginning to percolate into the academy as well as the wider community.The student of history in today's Caribbean is in a much better place. S/he has available not only perspectives centred in Africa and Asia, but an approach - Atlantic history - that puts into perspective the last five centuries of interaction among the continents fronting the Atlantic Ocean. Such works as Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness1 have done much to reshape our understanding of the larger historical universe of which the Caribbean forms a significant part, and of the complex of relationships that not only created the Caribbean as a region but also shaped the modern world as a whole.But how should a student or an interested lay person approach this particular perspective? The volume under review is a significant compendium of scholarship intended as a vade mecum both for the student and for the non-student eager to understand the history of the Atlantic region as a whole. While it is not intended as a replacement for a rigorous grounding in the subject, it serves as a solid basic introduction to conceiving the Atlantic as a historical region with over five centuries of interactions that define it.The editors have taken a two-pronged approach to the volume. Part one consists of a prologue and four articles - on the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries - that provide a general overview of the work and of the history of the Atlantic region. Part two consists of short, specialised essays on a variety of topics directly related to the region's history, and its political, economic and social development since the fifteenth century. It is a great pity that there is no overview article on the twentieth century to take into account the major political, social, and cultural transformations of the past hundred years.However, the specialist essays go a long way in making up for this. The essay on languages, for example, covers a range of topics, from the adoption of Tupi loan-words by Portuguese, and Portuguese loan-words in the Algonquian languages, to the origins of Jamaican Patwa in West Africa, to twentyfirst- century efforts to halt language decline. …