The Red Atlantic

Abstract

Until quite recently, Atlantic history seemed to be available in any color, so long as it was white. To be sure, this was the history of the North Atlantic rather than the South Atlantic, of Anglo-America rather than Latin America, and of the connections between North America and Europe rather than of those between both Americas and Africa. The origins of this history of the white Atlantic have been traced back to anti-isolationism in the United States during the Second World War and to the internationalism of the immediate postwar years, when historians constructed histories of "the Atlantic civilization" just as politicians were creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. This Atlantic Ocean was the Mediterranean of a western civilization defined as Euro-American and (for the first time, in the same circles) as "Judeo-Christian". 1 It was therefore racially, if not necessarily ethnically, homogeneous. Such uniformity was the product of selectivity. Like many genealogists, these early proponents of Atlantic history overlooked inconvenient or uncongenial ancestors. Students of the black Atlantic, from W. E. B. Du Bois to C. L. R. James and Eric Williams, were not recognized as fellow-practitioners of the history of the Atlantic world, just as Toussaint L'Ouverture's rebellion was not an event in R. R. Palmer's Age of the Democratic Revolution (1959-64), for example. 2