Soundings in Atlantic History

Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500–1830

Bernard Bailyn, Patricia L. Denault, Bernard Bailyn, Patricia L. Denault, Patricia L Denault

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780674061774
  9780674032767
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674053533
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

These innovative essays probe the underlying unities that bound the early modern Atlantic world into a regional whole and trace some of the intellectual currents that flowed through the lives of the people of the four continents. Drawn together in a comprehensive Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, the essays include analyses of the climate and ecology that underlay the slave trade, pan-Atlantic networks of religion and of commerce, legal and illegal, inter-ethnic collaboration in the development of tropical medicine, science as a product of imperial relations, the Protestant international that linked Boston and pietist Germany, and the awareness and meaning of the Atlantic world in the mind of that preeminent intellectual and percipient observer, David Hume.

In his Introduction, Bailyn explains that the Atlantic world was never self-enclosed or isolated from the rest of the globe but suggests that experiences in the early modern Atlantic region were distinctive in ways that shaped the course of world history.

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Figures, Maps, and Tables
• Introduction: Reflections on Some Major Themes / Bernard Bailyn
• 1. Ecology, Seasonality, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade / Stephen D. Behrendt
• 2. Kongo and Dahomey, 1660–1815: African Political Leadership in the Era of the Slave Trade and Its Impact on the Formation of African Identity in Brazil / Linda M. Heywood and John K. Thornton
• 3. The Triumphs of Mercury: Connection and Control in the Emerging Atlantic Economy / David J. Hancock
• 4. Inter-Imperial Smuggling in the Americas, 1600–1800 / Wim Klooster
• 5. Procurators and the Making of the Jesuits’ Atlantic Network / J. Gabriel Martínez-Serna
• 6. Dissenting Religious Communication Networks and European Migration, 1660–1710 / Rosalind J. Beiler
• 7. Typology in the Atlantic World: Early Modern Readings of Colonization / Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
• 8. A Courier between Empires: Hipólito da Costa and the Atlantic World / Neil Safier
• 9. Scientific Exchange in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World / Londa Schiebinger
• 10. Theopolis Americana: The City-State of Boston, the Republic of Letters, and the Protestant International, 1689–1739 / Mark A. Peterson
• 11. The Río de la Plata and Anglo-American Political and Social Models, 1810–1827 / Beatriz Dávilo
• 12. The Atlantic Worlds of David Hume / Emma Rothschild
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• Index