Thinking Atlantically: a conversation with Philip D. Morgan

Abstract

Although he may never have set out to become an expert in the field of Atlantic history, Philip D. Morgan, Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, is today one of the leading specialists on the history of the Atlantic world. His most recent edited collections – Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford University Press, 2009; co-edited with Jack P. Greene) and The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2011; co-edited with Nicholas Canny) – are incisive contributions toward bringing cohesion and definition to a historical subdiscipline whose contours have been in dispute ever since Jacques Godechot and Robert Roswell Palmer staked a claim to the field more than nearly 60 years ago, if not long before. A prize for his article on Caribbean slavery and livestock in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1995 was a meek harbinger for the veritable cascade of prizes and honors he won after publishing his magnum opus several years later: Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), a thorough and painstakingly researched study of plantation life that compared the Chesapeake region with its Carolinian counterpart, was awarded the coveted Bancroft Prize, Frederick Douglass Prize, and two other prizes from the American Historical Association, amongst other national and international recognition. Since then he has co-edited numerous volumes with the field's leading scholars and has continued to deal with central questions related to the Atlantic, including labor, slavery and the economics of plantation life, resistance and power, migration, and geography. His current project on the contours of the Caribbean and its historical formation as a distinct oceanic space will continue to probe many of the themes Morgan has grappled with since these earlier works, expanding no doubt on others. Over a series of conversations between Vancouver and Baltimore, Paris and New Orleans, Phil Morgan and I discussed his early interest in Atlantic history, his ideas about future directions for the field, and the rationale behind his most recent publications, certain to affect the course of the discipline in the short, medium, and long terms.