Atlantic History Research Articles

A Transnational Museum World of "Intangible Pasts"

This is the third volume in a series of museum- and exhibition-related essays built upon a significant sequence of major conferences. In 1991 Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine edited Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display followed a year later by Karp and others editing Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, both published by the Smith- sonian Institution Press. The present work evolved through considerable brainstorming at several gatherings held between 2001 and 2005, generously supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Whereas the first two volumes privileged museums in the United States and Western Europe, this one is primarily oriented to Third World museums, and transnational connections and comparisons. The authors are primarily anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of art. Although only one contributors might strictly be called an Americanist—Fath Davis Ruffins, a senior curator at the National Museum of American History in Washington—the project has significance for historians of American culture and politics as well as public historians, and should be placed alongside Thomas Bender's edited volume, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) and other works that have appeared calling for greater attention to Atlantic history and what Akira Iriye and others have designated as international history. Ivan Karp, a social anthropologist, was formerly curator of African cultures at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. He currently holds an NEH endowed chair at Emory University where he directs the Center for the Study of Public Scholarship. This third volume swings the focus of a project initially launched in 1989 even closer to his original interests. When the long-term enterprise began, its rationale sought to assert a more inclusive narrative of the United States in contemporary and traditional cultural produc- tion, supporting, among other projects, exhibitions of African American, Asian

Puritan conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700

This book argues that the striking resemblances in Spanish and Puritan discourses of colonization as exorcism and as spiritual gardening point to a common Atlantic history. These resemblances suggest that we are better off if we simply consider the Puritan colonization of New England as a continuation of Iberian models rather than a radically different colonizing experience. The book demonstrates that a wider Pan-American perspective can upset the most cherished national narratives of the United States, for it maintains that the Puritan colonization of New England was as much a chivalric, crusading act of Reconquista (against the Devil) as was the Spanish conquest.

Globalization, Creolization, and the Not-So-Peculiar Institution

IT HAS BECOME A CLICHE TO PROCLAIM THE NEED TO INTERNATIONALIZE the study of the United States. Well-funded conferences, special issues of prestigious journals, and countless panels at professional meetings have been devoted to discussions of how to overcome the self-perceived provincialism of American historians. I have joined in the parade of historians who have participated in these events. Like most academic fashions, this one is a response, at least in large part, to perceived shifts in the world in which we live--in this case to demographic, political, cultural, and economic transformations that come together under the rubric of globalization. Also like most academic fads, this one has inspired some scholars to do wonderful work, explicating, for example, the way a single crop and its markets can link people's fates across regions, nations, and continents or the way that innovations in journalistic practices helped create a smaller world. (1) This trend has also inspired its share of flashy but superficial scholarship that disguises old ideas by giving them new labels. Historians of slavery and historians of colonial British America can, perhaps, be forgiven for wondering what the globalizing fuss is all about. Through no particular virtues or insights of their own, they have long had to address many questions through transnational approaches. That is in part because scholars of colonial British America are inherently pulled into two distinct national historiographies--that of Great Britain and that of the United States. Scholars of slavery have found themselves in an analogous position as they have attempted to conceptualize the relationships between Old World heritages and New World realities. Atlantic approaches to the history of slavery in the Americas reach back to W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, Melville J. Herskovits, and Eric Williams, so it is hardly surprising that the first formal program in Atlantic history and culture at an American university emerged during the 1970s out of the collaboration of historical anthropologists of Afro-Caribbean experiences and historians of the early modern societies that bordered the Atlantic. (2) By the 1970s, then, historians of slavery in colonial British America were being pushed by intellectual traditions and institutional forces to understand the institution of slavery and the experiences of those victimized by it in transnational contexts that included Africa, Europe, and non-English speaking societies in the Americas. If, as a result, the rage for globalizing perspectives did not hit them with the same force that it hit other practitioners of U.S. history, it has nonetheless helped foster important, though subtler, shifts in the field. As it happens, this can be traced with unusual chronological precision, because of a coincidence in timing. Almost ten years ago Philip D. Morgan published Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry, and Ira Berlin published Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America. Each book represents the culmination of over twenty years of work by one of the most respected historians of American slavery. Both are constructed around questions rooted in the historiography of the United States, and both build on the preceding decade's enormous flowering of local studies of slavery in colonial North America. Both books work within the main currents of the field that their authors had helped to shape by taking Atlantic approaches to colonial slavery. Together they all but swept the major professional book prizes in American history in 1998, and together they can be understood to have brought to fruition a generation of scholarship on slavery in colonial North America. (3) Many Thousands Gone is a synthetic work that seeks to bring interpretive order to the mass of information about colonial slavery that had accumulated from the mid-1970s--when books by Peter H. …

Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America

Never truly a entirely detached from the home countries of its immigrants, colonial America, over the generations, became a model of transatlantic culture. Colonial society was shaped by the conflict between colonists' need to adapt to the American environment and their desire to perpetuate old world traditions or to imitate the charismatic model of the British establishment. In the course of colonial history, these contrasting impulses produced a host of distinctive cultures and identities. In this impressive new collection, prominent scholars of early American history explore this complex dynamic of accommodation and replication to demonstrate how early American societies developed from the intersection of American and Atlantic influences. The volume, edited by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully, offers fresh perspectives on colonial history and on early American attitudes toward slavery and ethnicity, native Americans, and the environment, as well as colonial social, economic, and political development. It reveals the myriad ways in which American colonists were the inhabitants and subjects of a wider Atlantic world. Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America, one of a three-volume series under the editorship of Jack P. Greene, aims to give students of Atlantic history a state of the field survey by pursuing interesting lines of research and raising new questions. The entire series, Anglo-America in the Transatlantic World, engages the major organizing themes of the subject through a collection of high-level, debate-inspiring essays, inviting readers to think anew about the complex ways in which the Atlantic experience shaped both American societies and the Atlantic world itself.

"Esse Est Percipi": The Strange Case of Early American Economic History

TO START A REVIEW ESSAY IN EARLY MODERN ECONOMIC HISTORY WITH A phrase associated with Bishop George Berkeley, one of that era's foremost immaterialists, is both ironic and depressing. But this phrase, esse est percipi--to be is to be perceived--captures well the present predicament economic historians of that period face. (1) Although some excellent work is still being done in the field of economic history, it is little appreciated, indeed, little read. (2) With a nod to the bishop, we might even ask: If an economic historian writes an article in the Journal of Economic History or in Explorations in Economic History, and no one reads it, did he or she really write it? Esse est percipi. To be sure, there have been some positive developments in recent years, slivers of optimism, causes for hope. The ever-increasing availability of primary sources online and the development of new and/or improved data sets such as the wonderful Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database and the enlarged section titled Colonial in the recently released millennial edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States make it easier to study the early American economy. (3) The publication of impressive scholarly syntheses such as the colonial volume in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States and the relevant volumes in The Oxford History of the British Empire, among others, is well worth noting, too. (4) The rise of Atlantic history has generated more interest among scholars in flows of one type or another, including at times flows of labor, capital, and commodities. Cathy Matson's energetic leadership of the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEAES) at the Library Company of Philadelphia has raised the profile of economic history a bit and thereby paid some dividends, so to speak. The interests of social, environmental, cultural, and even intellectual historians sometimes bleed, and occasionally even hemorrhage, into the economic realm, which raises the possibility of new alliances. Still, economic historians, particularly those of a quantitative ilk, are for the most part off in the corner counting by themselves. Why is this the case? There are a number of reasons for the isolation, if not out-and-out quarantine, of economic history and economic historians from the scholarly mainstream in recent decades. The so-called cultural turn in historical circles in the 1980s and 1990s resulted in large-scale flight from what some call QUASSH--quantitative social science history--if not from the material world altogether. (5) For their part, economic historians, increasingly trained in departments of economics, looked to more rigorous scholarly audiences and venues, both because of their conversance and comfort with theory and formal methods and because traditional historical approaches and explanations--and perhaps historians as well--seemed to them (the Few, the Proud, the Numerate) so squishy, soft, and gelatinous. Moreover, some economic historians have eschewed clear, jargon-free prose accessible to those not mathematically inclined. If economists doing economic history--or historical economics, as the most ardent regrettably tried to rename the field--were a bit bumptious and presumptuous about their more humanistic peers, traditional historians often set themselves up for such treatment. Since the 1980s, traditional historians have beat a fast retreat from what seventeenth-century political arithmetician Sir William Petty referred to as number, weight, or measure, and most graduate admissions committees have looked at quants in the applicant pool as quaint, their 780 quantitative scores on the Graduate Record Examinations akin to artifacts in Little Nell Trent's grandfather's curiosity shop, or at best as atavisms associated with the deviant behaviorism plaguing the profession in the 1970s. (6) Numbers just don't do it for a graduate student once told me, explaining why he skipped over any and all tables, figures, and graphs that appeared in any historical text he was assigned. …

J. H. ELLIOTT. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. xx, 546. $35.00.

Academic presses are releasing a flood of books labeled to catch the current wave of interest in “Atlantic history.” There are histories of white, black, red, and green Atlantics, and there are studies of Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish ones, as well as some that can be called American. Academic conferences and internet bulletin boards broker debates about what Atlantic history is and how to teach it. J. H. Elliott's masterly synthesis is bound to become part of those debates, though it addresses neither of them directly. When a leading expert on the history of early modern Spain and its empire offers a detailed comparison between Britain and Spain in America, sympathetic professional readers can be forgiven for holding their breath. So much comparative history is a shallow commerce in stereotypes, platitudes, and idiosyncrasies that most careful historians are inclined to avoid the approach entirely. Elliott promises a very nuanced playing of his analytic accordion, which alternates between pushing these competing colonial worlds together and then pulling them apart. While incorporating the rich recent scholarship on Amerindian and slave societies, he frankly admits “my principal focus has been the development of the settler societies and their relationship with their mother countries” (p. xviii). This is a social and political history of two successful transatlantic applications of the power to exploit, integrate, and create. Almost inevitably, the study divides into the three phases of occupation, consolidation, and emancipation. Such simplicity promises much less than this insightful and illuminating exploration delivers.

Canizares-Esguerra & Seeman, The Atlantic In Global History 1500-2000

"The Atlantic world" has in recent decades become a widely accepted unit of study and analysis among historians. Many global history textbooks devote at least a chapter to the "Atlantic world," with such chapters often referring in their titles to "Europeans, Africans, and the New World." Courses in Atlantic history have become increasingly common, and publishers have been quick to respond with textbooks and readers. But how exactly does the "Atlantic world" fit into "global history?"

Beyond the Atlantic: Connecting Migration and World History in the Age of Imperialism, 1840–1940

The age of mass migration that commenced in the 1840s has traditionally been conceived within the orbit of Atlantic history, and rendered as a narrative of modernity and industrialization. At an individual level the departure for the New World was propelled by rising expectations, which nicely fitted the macro-pattern of converging labour markets between North-America – as well as Australia for that matter – and Europe. Many of the assumptions that brought global migration under the aegis of modernization have been refuted, or at least seriously questioned. But that still leaves us with the important question whether there are alternative paradigms available that fit the realities both within and outside the North Atlantic world. Some have already answered the question negatively. According to Hatton and Williamson, it is impossible to find a unifying paradigm that would enable us to develop a global migration history. Their argument is too important not to be cited:

AFTERWORD

This issue has been concerned with two problems. First, all the contributors have considered how ideas travelled to, from and within nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. It examines how these ideas were received and reinterpreted by India's English-influenced intelligentsia in the light of its own intellectual histories. Second, the volume is intended as a contribution to an emerging global and trans-national history of ideas that attempts to set the sophisticated traditions of European, Atlantic, Islamic and Asian intellectual history in a world context.

Amongst Empires: A Short History of Ireland and Empire Studies in International Context

This essay begins with a summary overview of emergent intellectual trends that are redefining the study of empire today. It then charts a history of modern Irish scholarship on empire, discussing the achievements and limitations of Atlantic History, Commonwealth History, and postcolonial studies.1 The piece closes with a discus- sion of how Empire Studies in Ireland might be reoriented in the future so as to deal not only with Irish responses to the now-vanished British Empire but also to the wider European imperial system and to the American neo-imperialism that emerged in its wake.

Tidal Waves: The New Coastal History

This essay reviews recent scholarship in oceanic and imperial history in the context of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Marcus Rediker's classic book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. It offers a critique of Atlantic History as it is currently practiced and proposes a new category, history, to describe scholarship that engages with oceans but does not center upon them. In evaluating work by N.A.M. Rodger, Paul Gilje, Kathleen Wilson, Michael Fisher, and others, the essay explores how ships and sailors both are, and are not, representative of the social history of islands and coastal regions.

Planting families: Intent and outcome in the development of colonial Georgia

This article examines the evolution of a plantation society in the British American colony of Georgia. It explores the original intentions of founders and settlers, and how those intentions were discarded or adapted in the face of a volatile demographic environment. It uses information from land grant applications to describe the make-up of late colonial families, and locates the experiences of the Georgia population within the broader context of Atlantic population history. In particular, it argues that familial instability initially catalysed the emergence of a plantation system. The “family” was later accorded real significance in plantation Georgia only when it became serviceable to provincial elites, though it remained important as an organising unit beyond the plantation world, and as a source of shared aspirations.

Babylon, Christianity, and Republicanism in New World Slave Societies

Babylon, Christianity, and Republicanism in New World Slave Societies María Elena Díaz (bio) A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804. By Laurent Dubois . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 466. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.) Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. By Laurent Dubois . (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 384. $29.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.) The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil. By Laura de Mello e Souza . Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty . (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Pp. 374. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.) Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. By Stuart B. Schwartz . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 368. $59.95 cloth, $22.50 paper.) Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias. By Margaret M. Olsen . (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Pp. 208. $59.95 cloth.) Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835. By Aline Helg . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 384. $59.95 cloth, $22.50 paper.) The expansion of Europe in the fifteenth century, the establishment of colonies in the New World and generally speaking, the emergence of a dynamic Atlantic region produced, for better or worse, an unprecedented circulation of peoples, commodities, discourses, and practices across that ocean. Atlantic racial slavery was one sordid aspect of all that oceanic activity. That forced migration of millions of captive people entailed irrevocable transformations for all those involved in the crossing, for the new societies they entered, and probably for the communities they left behind forever. Research on differing aspects of Atlantic racial slavery [End Page 265] and on the new lives, identities, and communities that people of African descent constructed in New World colonial and postcolonial societies has constituted one of the fastest-growing areas in Latin American history in the last three decades, but particularly in the last ten to fifteen years. Although probably more work has been recently coming out on the postcolonial modern period, the Latin American colonial field has produced its share of solid research as the study of slavery moves out of the plantation loci (the Babylon of the title) into new sites of life and work (urban areas, military frontiers, mines, maroon and corporate communities, lay brotherhoods) and also into new geographical regions. There is not only a new interest in colonial peripheries and frontiers such as those in Colombia, Ecuador, eastern Cuba, and Florida but magnet regions such as Mexico, which are usually construed as mestizo or Indian, are also increasingly the focus of research on enslaved and free people of African descent (albeit there is no example of such work in this group of books). This expanding interest is also benefiting from the ever wider academic frameworks of Atlantic history and African diasporic studies, as well as from extra-academic movements and mobilizations in some Latin American regions (Colombia and Brazil in particular). This new wave of research is still developing its own specialized historiography, but future work on Latin America may soon turn to more hybrid social and racial formations and to intersections and comparisons with other groups, particularly Indians and castas. When appropriate, I will indicate potential moves in that comparative direction as suggested by some of the work reviewed here. The specific set of books under review in this essay represents a relatively wide range of themes, approaches and lines of research within this area of work in colonial historiography. The meaning of the disparate triad in this essay's title: "Babylon,""Christianity," and "Republicanism," will become clearer as the works are discussed. These books explore the limits and outcomes of a range of expanding projects and discourses that attempted to reconstitute subjects of African descent in various Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonial Atlantic locations, first as slaves, commodities, and laborers; as enslaved black, Christianized subjects; and later at the dawn of the old (colonial) regimes as free Republican citizens. Stuart Schwartz' anthology Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680 is a...

Atlantic History: Concept and Contours, by Bernard Bailyn

<i>Atlantic History: Concept and Contours</i>, by Bernard Bailyn

Transnational History at Our Backs: A Long View of Larsen, Woolf, and Queer Racial Subjectivity in Atlantic Modernism

Transnational History at Our Backs:A Long View of Larsen, Woolf, and Queer Racial Subjectivity in Atlantic Modernism Laura Doyle (bio) Early in her novel Jacob's Room, Virginia Woolf makes us privy to a suggestively erotic scene between two men, and in the process she signals her interest in a certain dimension of British history. The title character Jacob Flanders and his friend Will Durrant read Shakespeare and eat lunch together as they sail to the Scilly Isles to visit Durrant's family: [Timmy Durrant] with a sprout of beard, looking sternly at the stars, then at a compass, would have moved a woman. Jacob, of course, was not a woman. The sight of Timmy Durrant was no sight for him, nothing to set against the sky and worship; far from it. They had quarreled. Why the right way to open a tin of beef, with Shakespeare on board, under conditions of such splendour, should have turned them to sulky schoolboys, none can tell ships have been wrecked here.1 Although "none can tell" why two young men might become sulky in a scene presided over by Shakespeare (whom Jacob places even above the Greeks, and Richard Dalloway in Woolf's next novel deplores for his sonnets that invite us to peep through keyholes), and although Woolf's narrator doth protest (too much) about the possibility that Jacob could be moved by the sight of Durrant, most twenty-first-century readers would detect the gay codes (as a circle of Woolf's contemporaries undoubtedly did). Woolf more broadly hints at her gay subtext when she has Jacob undress, swim, and bathe "naked" at the very moment when Shakespeare is knocked overboard, "floating merrily away . . . he went under" (JR, 39). The narrator ends her description with [End Page 531] a vision of "waves breaking unseen by anyone" and the whole bay rising "to heaven in a kind of ecstasy" (ibid.). The ecstasy is, however, quickly followed by (post-coital?) sorrow, so that "the cottage smoke droops, [and] has the look of a mourning emblem, a flag floating its caress over a grave" (ibid.). In Greece, the narrator notes, this "sadness would be routed by strangeness and excitement and the nudge of a classical education,"—in other words, a community of male intimacy—but on the Cornish hills, "the chimneys and the coast-guard stations and the little bays with waves breaking unseen by anyone make one remember the overpowering sorrow." "And what can this sorrow be?" the narrator asks. And then answers: "It comes from the houses on the coast. We start transparent, and then the cloud thickens. All history backs our panes of glass. To escape is vain" (JR, 40). What is this history that clouds the panes of glass and saddens the swimmer? One answer would of course be the legacy of all manner of gendered cruelty. Yet Woolf gives us clues to another, closely related history at the heart of this passage: Atlantic history. It is no coincidence, I will argue, that this is a boat scene, a sea-crossing associated with wrecked ships, the sorrow of which is particularly evoked by coast-guard stations and little bays and waves breaking unseen by anyone—which make one "remember" a sad history. Woolf understands that this history is a long, transnational history, full of perilous sea crossings that often entail a sexual crisis or ruin. A striking number of English-language modernist writers likewise situate their stories of sexual or gender trouble within a transnational, Atlantic history. Here I will ultimately focus on Nella Larsen and Virginia Woolf as two authors who typify this pattern among a number of English-language modernists—such as Rhys, McKay, Stein, Hurston, Forster, and Hemingway, to name a few—whom I will call Atlantic modernists and understand as one kind of geomodernist.2 It is by now a commonplace that modernism probes the formation of the social subject, using literary form to expose or rearrange the subject's social coordinates. For these writers, Atlantic and transnational history provides one crucial set of such coordinates, a historical set. Indeed, attention to the Atlantic dimension of their work may allow us to do fuller...

Atlantic History: Concept and Contours

Book Review| August 01 2006 Atlantic History: Concept and Contours Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 160 pp. J. G. A. Pocock J. G. A. Pocock Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Common Knowledge (2006) 12 (3): 524. https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2006-019 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation J. G. A. Pocock; Atlantic History: Concept and Contours. Common Knowledge 1 August 2006; 12 (3): 524. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-2006-019 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsCommon Knowledge Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: LITTLE REVIEWS You do not currently have access to this content.

Only Connect: The Rise and Rise (and Fall?) of Atlantic History

July/August 2006 Historically Speaking 19 eral-purpose technologies necessary to sustain rates of productivity and economic growth comparable to those achieved during the early post-World War II decades and again during the information technology bubble that began in the early 1990s. I have also argued that the defense efforts and wars in which we have been engaged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries —and in which we are likely to be engaged for the next several decades—are unlikely to induce the development of new general-purpose technologies. The ability of the United States to sustain rapid productivity and economic growth in the future will require the design and implementation of civil institutions capable of mobilizing the necessary scientific, technical, and financial resources. As of yet, however, the United States has demonstrated little capacity to mobilize and direct public resources for the generation of new commercial general-purpose technologies . Unless it does so, I am forced to conclude that when the history of American technology development in the next several decades is eventually written, it will be written in the context of slower productivity and economic growth than the relativelyhigh rates that prevailed in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s and during the productivity bubble that began during the early 1990s. Vernon W. Ruttan is RegentsProfessorEmeritus in the departmentof appliedeconomicsandin the department of economics, andadjunctprofessorin the HubertH HumphreyInstitute of PublicAffairs, University of Minnesota. He is the authorofIs War Necessary for Economic Growth? Military Procurement and Technology Development (Oxford University Press, 2006). He has been electedaYellowof the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Saences and to membership in the NationalAcademy of Sciences. 1 Waldemar W Kaempffert, "War and Technology," AmericanJournalof Sociology 46 (1941): 431-444. 2 Nathan Rosenberg, Technology andAmerican Economic Growth (Harper and Row, 1972); Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers FerryArmory andtheNew Technology (Cornell University Press, 1977). '' ThomasJ. Misa, "Military Needs, Commercial Realities and the Development of the Transistor, 1948-1958," in Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and TechnologicalChange: Perspectives on the American Experience (MIT Press, 1966), 253-288. ' For the best single account of the development of the Internet see Thomas P. Hughes, RescuingPrometheus (Pantheon, 1998). Only Connect: The Rise and Rise (and Fall?) of Atlantic History Trevor Burnard Stocks in Atlantic history are high. "We are all Atlanticists now," declares David Armitage with blithe disregard for the perils of hubris. The topic has developed the type of institutional apparatus that signals it is more than a passing fancy. Courses on "The Atlantic World" abound; positions in Atlantic history have been advertised at an increasing number of institutions; and postgraduate programs for Atlantic history specialists are now appearing . Atlantic historians gather at conferences at exotic locations around the world; research centers with an Atlantic focus are created every year; and funding opportunities to do Atlantic history are becoming more frequent. Perhaps most telling, major universities , research libraries, and scholarly organizations have begun to treat Atlantic history as a subfield, making it possible for a cadre of historians to advance their careers, meet lots of agreeable people who share their own predilections in interesting and stimulating places, and network through joint participation in seminars and fellowships. The Atlantic way allows budding historians a multitude of new research and job opportunities . This is a remarkable turnabout, considering the dim prospects facing English-speaking historians of the early modern era in the late 1970s. Waterfront view of Bridgetown, Barbados, 1695. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number LCUSZ62 -1 24469]. For a graduate student in early American history, topics and areas that had previously been at the cutting edge of scholarship were now passé. The scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s led away from a broadening vision. The work of scholars influenced by the Annales school was extraordinary , ushering in a golden age of scholarship. But a major failure of social history in all its multitudinous varieties was a loss of focus. Historians concentrated so intently on the details of small-scale communities that, as Bernard Bailyn put it in an extremely influential 1982 jeremiad , previously "discrete and easily controllable" fields of knowledge had become "boundless" and "incomprehensible," the "wider boundaries" unclear. Historians coming into graduate...

Charles I, Virginia, and the Idea of Atlantic History

On 20 February 1637/38, the Virginia House of Burgesses, ‘called by his Majesty's appointment’, convened to consider five ‘Propositions’ offered by Charles 1 for the reformation of their colony's tobacco trade. An investigation into the career and context of this ‘Assembly’ better informs us of the character of that monarch's government and, correspondingly, on English ‘state formation’ and empire in the first half of the seventeenth century. We learn that, as in its three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the Crown and its officers experienced little joy in their efforts to clear the lines of authority connecting Whitehall with the rest of the king's domains.

Reviews

To the Editor: I appreciate Alison Games's comments on my Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (AHR, April 2006, 434–435), but I am surprised by her saying that I have omitted Africa and blacks from the story. They are central to both essays. In the first—an exploration of how Atlantic history emerged as a historical subject as distinct from a geographical reference—I stress the critical importance of the outpouring of studies of the slave trade and Africa during and after the 1960s; and in the second essay—a sketch of the substantive historical shape of the subject—I revert to it again, specifying the African population as far and away the largest component of the Western Hemisphere's labor force: “it was of course from Africa that by far the largest number of workers were drawn to the Western Hemisphere: a total of over 5.5 million by 1775—36 percent to British America, 32 percent to Portuguese territory, 13 percent to French territory, 9 percent to Spanish. Enslaved and distributed by a pan-Atlantic, Afro-European coercive commercial system, they were people whose presence almost everywhere in the Western Hemisphere was a major demographic, social, and economic force—in some places (St. Domingue, South Carolina) an overwhelming force.” As to Africa and slavery's place in the historical phases I sketch, slavery in and from Africa was in its essence barbarous and hence is central to the early phase of the region's development. And there are references to Africa and slavery throughout the book. Of course I do not attempt to incorporate a sketch of the history of Africa in this outline story, any more than histories of England, Spain, the Netherlands, or France.

Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities

Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities