Atlantic History

AHR Forum

Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities

ALISON GAMES

A historical study centered on a stretch of water has all the charms but undoubtedly

all the dangers of a new departure.

Fernand BraudeP

FERNAND BRAUDEL LAUNCHED his massive history of the Mediterranean with an epigraph

by the sixteenth-century priest José de Acosta. "To this day," wrote Acosta

in his own equally massive Natural and Moral History of the East and West Indies,

"they have not discovered at the Indies any mediterranian sea as in Europe, Asia and

Affrike."2 The irony is delicious in hindsight. While Europeans never found their

own Mediterranean in the Americas, historians have since discovered the Atlantic

as a unit of historical analysis. The very ocean that Acosta crossed to undertake

missionary work in America has become an organizing principle through which

scholars investigate the histories of the four landmasses it links. Yet the Atlantic does

not have the coherence that Acosta first identified for the Mediterranean, nor that

Braudel proposed and delineated centuries later; nor, indeed, is it possible to speak

with confidence of an Atlantic system or a uniform region. Attempts to write a

Braudelian Atlantic history—one that includes and connects the entire region—

remain elusive, driven in part by methodological impediments, by the real disjunctions

that characterized the Atlantic's historical and geographic components, by the

disciplinary divisions that discourage historians from speaking to and writing for

each other, and by the challenge of finding a vantage that is not rooted in any single

place. But if a broad vision of the Atlantic such as the one Braudel sought for the

Mediterranean is elusive, it nonetheless remains desirable. Scholars working in the

field of Atlantic history have demonstrated the explanatory power of this geographic

region as a unit of analysis: Atlantic perspectives deepen our understanding of trans-

I wish to thank readers who looked at earlier versions of this article, especially Wim Klooster and the

anonymous reviewers for the AHR, and colleagues who heard and commented on aspects of this piece

at conferences. I also thank Douglas Egerton, David Hancock, Kris Lane, John McNeill, Jennifer Morgan,

Marcy Norton, Adam Rothman, John Tutino, Jim Williams, and Donald Wright for many helpful

conversations on the challenges of teaching and writing regional, Atlantic, and global histories.

1 Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân

Reynolds, 2 vols. (New York, t973), 1: 19.

^ This precise phrasing is from José de Acosta, The Naturall and Morall Historie of the East and West

Indies (London, 1604), 151. Braudel cited the 1558 edition, p. 94.

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742 Alison Games

formations over a period of several centuries, cast old prohlems in an entirely new

light, and illuminate connections hitherto obscured.

Braudel remarked in 1972 that he helieved that two "truths" of his analysis remained

"unchallenged." His first truth was what he characterized as the "unity and

coherence of the Mediterranean region." The Mediterranean itself was, as Braudel

put it, a "complex of seas," hut nonetheless the self-contained nature of the sea and

the common features of the kingdoms and empires that it linked enahled Braudel

and those who followed him to insist on the value of writing ahout the region in its

entirety, privileging commonalities and connections over discrete and local features.^

As Acosta recognized, the unit had long historical precedent, made visihle on maps

of ancient empires whose holdings circled the sea and whose dominion provided

political unity to much of the region.

Here we confront the first crucial divergence hetween the Atlantic and the spatial

perspective that animated Braudel's Mediterranean. The path of hurricanes on their

western trek from Africa to the Carihhean and up the North American coast reminds

us annually of the environmental connections of the Atlantic, hut the landmasses

surrounding the Atlantic are characterized hy their enormous variety, with hundreds

of microclimates, from the swath of the Sahara Desert to the tropical rainforests of

equatorial regions to the tundra of Nunavut. The people who lived around the ocean

inhabited different disease environments, and those who lived in the Americas had

long enjoyed a geographic isolation that had catastrophic consequences in their lack

of immunity to Eurasian diseases. Such coherence as Atlantic history might offer will

not come from its environmental features. These differences were echoed in political

and social practices. The challenges that Braudel identified in his history of the Mediterranean

resonate deeply with historians of the Atlantic. His great regret (or so he

avowed in his preface) was his uneven treatment of the states of the region. He

deplored specifically his inability to come to terms with the Ottoman Empire. Magnify

this challenge a thousandfold, and it is possible to begin to appreciate the difficulties

of making sense of the individual pieces of the Atlantic and the ways in which

these parts ultimately converged or interacted. The kingdoms, states, and empires

that became involved in Atlantic exchanges together contained thousands of different

languages (two thousand in the Americas alone, with considerably less variation

in those European and African states oriented toward the Atlantic). The most

fundamental features of many of the people of the Atlantic remain dimly understood.

Historians debate population sizes in the Americas, and must estimate where, exactly,

people lived. John Thornton's meticulous efforts to map the political boundaries

of Atlantic Africa remind us of the absence of some of the crucial building

blocks for an ocean-based history: for three of the four landmasses surrounding the

ocean, we do not know with the certainty that historians like who lived where, under

what jurisdiction, and with how many other people.'*

If the Atlantic is a less obvious and coherent unit than the Mediterranean, it is

also an anachronistic one. Historians have first had to invent the region: the emer-

3 Braudel, Mediterranean, 1:14,17. My thanks to Markus Vink for sharing with me an early version

of his "From Port City to World System: Spatial Constructs of Dutch Indian Ocean Studies, 1500-1800,"

Itinerario 28, no. 2 (2004): 45-116.

" John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (New York,

1992; 2nd ed., 1998), x-xxxvi.

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW JUNE 2006

Atlantic History 743

gence of the Atlantic as a single unit of analysis reflects trends in historical geography.

What we call the Atlantic Ocean, our ancestors perceived as several distinct

seas. The regions we have since labeled the North and South American continents

are similarly modern creations.^ Well into the nineteenth century, no one had an

accurate idea of what these landmasses looked like or whether they were even connected

to the Eurasian landmass. The components of Atlantic history—two of the

four continents and even the ocean itself—are modern impositions.

And yet this unit of analysis, however artificially constructed it might be from the

perspective of historical geography, has become sufficiently compelling to drive historical

scholarship. Who are these scholars, and what is their impetus toward an

Atlantic perspective? In one of the first efforts to articulate the history of this emerging

field and to explain the origins of the current interest in the region, Bernard

Bailyn argued that Atlantic history was a product of twentieth-century political developments.^

But it is also possible to identify other converging strands of historical

inquiry. Indeed, this North Atlantic diplomatic longue durée cannot alone explain the

passion that has developed for all things Atlantic. Three converging strands have

delineated different and sometimes incompatible Atlantics. First and foremost, historians

of the transatlantic slave trade have been especially insistent about putting

an Atlantic perspective at the center of their work, starting with Philip D. Curtin's

painstaking efforts to calculate the size of the trade, and continuing with the innovative

and extensive research on the African diaspora.'^ This vital field has opened

up the ocean as a coherent unit of study by following the captives who moved across

it, fanning out to Europe, to the islands of the Caribbean and the Atlantic, and to

the American landmasses, especially Brazil. This approach, unfettered by state borders,

pursues the logical lines of the trade, and puts people at the center, tracking

the transmission of all elements of culture, from political identity to material goods

to language to religion, all around the Atlantic basin. No other field has been so

aggressively engaged

...