The Atlantic World: Concept and

Contours

The Discovery of America “The world was “discovered a long

time ago, well before the Great Discoveries … Europe’s own achievement was to discover the Atlantic and to master its difficult stretches, currents and winds. This late success gained it the doors and routes of the seven seas.”

Fernand Braudel

The Genealogy of Atlantic History

Wilsonian Universalism, “Atlantic Civilization” and Cold war politics

The development of Annales history and the new social history

John Pocock – call for “new British history” and creation of the Atlantic republican tradition

Bailyn – 1982 address to the American Historical Association on the challenge of modern historiography

Atlantic Historiography David Armitage:

“We are all Atlanticists now.”

Bernard Bailyn: “Atlantic history is more than the sum of an aggregation of several national or regional histories.”

Alison Games: “Atlantic History ultimately privileges and requires history without borders”

Harvard International Seminar of the Atlantic world

Bailyn and the causes of Atlantic History

“historians tired of being analysts of technical problems abstracted from the past” They wanted to become “narrators of worlds in motion – worlds as complex, as unpredictable, as transient as our own.”

“The Challenge of Modern Historiography” (1982) and Atlantic History (2005)

The Language of Atlantic History

Favourite words: movement, diversity, complex, networks, creation, negotiations, enlargement, dynamic, permeable, multiple, invention, exchanges, broadening, cosmoplitan, connections, new, linkages

Words out of favour: old, static, isolated, domestic

A decentered Atlantic? Jack P. Greene: a

“seething discontent” with “narrow Eurocentrism” and with the lack of attention given in the late 1960s to the part of the globe that was not western Europe or North America

Centre and Periphery D.W. Meinig: Atlantic history as “a

sudden and harsh encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them both into a single New World.”

America was “a spectrum showing gradations in power, intensity of interaction, and social character” in which “imperial power declined with distance.”

Atlantic history as a spider web

David Hancock: The Atlantic world as a a complex, non-linear and largely self-governing adaptive system

“Large scale conditions … shaped the contours of the outcomes of the net results of abundant, chaotic and decentralised interactions among self-regarding individuals, but the outline of specific outcomes was drawn by the individuals directly involved.”

Atlantic history: some problems

Lack of theoretical explicitness Overemphasis on networks and

movement Uneasy relationship with

imperialism Is Atlantic history just a smaller

version of global history?