The Atlantic in World History, 1490-1830

Trevor Burnard

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781350073524
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350073548
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Atlantic in World History, 1490-1830 looks at the historical connections between four continents – Africa, Europe, North America and South America – through the lens of Atlantic history. It shows how the Atlantic has been more than just an ocean: it has been an important site of circulation and transmission, allowing exchanges and interchanges which have profoundly shaped the development of the world. Divided into four thematic sections, Trevor Burnard's sweeping yet concise narrative covers the period from the voyages of Columbus to the New World in the 1490s through to the end of the Age of Revolutions around 1830. It deals with key topics including the Columbian exchange, Atlantic slavery and abolition, war as a global phenomenon, the Age of Revolution, religious conversion, nation-building, trade and commerce and intellectual movements such as the Enlightenment. Rather than focusing on the 'rise of the West', Burnard stresses the interactive nature of encounters between various parts of the world, setting local case studies within his broader interconnected narrative. Written by a leading historian of Atlantic history, and including further reading lists, images and maps as well as a companion website featuring discussion questions, timelines and primary source extracts, this is an essential book for students of Atlantic and world history.

PART ONE

History and Historiography

1

ATLANTIC HISTORY AND THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

THE IDEA OF ATLANTIC HISTORY

This book looks at the historical connections between four continents – Africa, Europe, North America and South America – through the lens of one of the more exciting developments in the history of the early modern world – Atlantic history. Atlantic history, I believe, is not just a fashion nor merely a useful methodology through which to navigate one’s way through institutional imperatives but is also an interesting and intellectually respectable way of looking at important historical processes. The institutional apparatus that has accompanied the advent of Atlantic history as one of the more important historiographical developments of recent times has not just developed because it met the needs of a generation of historians anxious to establish themselves in a dynamic new area. Atlantic history has real intellectual clout. Its principal theme – that the Atlantic from the fifteenth century to the present was more than just an ocean, more than just a physical fact but was a particular zone of exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission – is not only true in the sense that these exchanges and interchanges shaped profoundly the texture of life in at least four continents over a very long period of time but is also a conceptual leap forward, allowing historians to make links between place, people and periods that enrich our understanding of the complexities of a vital passage in the development of the world that we all inhabit. The idea of Atlantic history, as a field of historical enquiry that is more than the sum of an aggregation of several national or regional histories, is a very appealing one on intellectual terms alone.

If the Atlantic World could not have emerged and developed without an exponential movement of people, goods, capitals and ideas, it should not be confused with these connections per se. Most people who inhabited the Atlantic World, in Europe, in Africa and in the Americas, did not have a transatlantic experience; they did not move onwards from their places of birth and residence to reside a long distance from family and friends. Nevertheless, their lives could have been greatly affected by Atlantic dynamics even if they remained close to where they were raised. Thus, Atlantic history is something more than ‘connected history’. It has an explanatory and interpretative dimension. The Atlantic paradigm postulates that one cannot understand the way societies on both sides of the Atlantic evolved and were transformed over time without taking into account the impact of Atlantic connections and dynamics, meaning not only transatlantic, but also hemispheric, regional and local connections. Indeed, it is important to play with all the possible scales to analyse which were the most influential, depending on the place, time and topic into consideration. As John Elliott underlines, it is also critical to avoid the ‘natural temptation to exaggerate the extent to which one side of the Atlantic influenced developments on the other, perhaps in an effort to prove the writer’s Atlanticist credentials’. As Elliot continues: ‘but it needs to be recognized that there is no need to find a consistency, and still less a progressive development, of interaction over time and space. At sometimes and in some places the Atlantic component will figure strongly, while at others it may well occupy a subordinate position. Tracing and explaining the fluctuations in the degree of interaction between the whole and the parts is a necessary element in the writing of Atlantic history.’¹

Hence, what characterizes most the Atlantic approach is its permissiveness, the fact that it has the potential to free historians from all historiographical boundaries, as Emma Rothschild notes.² Atlanticists have not tried to impose a new scale of analysis – the Atlantic scale – to the detriment of all other spatial scales. Rather, the introduction of this new scale has forced historians more generally to address and problematize the issue of spatial scale instead of working at the national, colonial or imperial scale by inertia or tradition. In this sense, Atlantic history is part of a more global spatial turn, an expression which has been used to describe several new historiographical trends, but which more generally underscores a new attention to space and territory, behind time, among historians. Thus, historians of the Atlantic World very often combine various scales from the local to the imperial or continental, to the Atlantic or the global, depending on what they analyse. Indeed, instead of promoting global, imperial or hemispheric history to replace Atlantic history, it is possible to play with all these scales to enrich and complexify our understanding of the past.

Cécile Vidal has argued that taking this approach raises the historiographical stakes considerably. She asks whether we should ‘develop a more mobile and connective Atlantic history, which would mainly investigate the circulations and exchanges that led to the emergence and growing integration of the Atlantic world’ or should we ‘create a localised Atlantic history, which would focus on the impact of these connections on the internal evolution of the connected societies in a comparative perspective and mostly underline the diversity and fragmentation of the Atlantic world?’³ What answer is chosen – the writing of a reasonably coherent and autonomous Atlantic World or writing connected histories the privilege the Atlantic scale but also open up to other scales of analysis, such as the global scale – will determine whether scholars see Atlantic history as a full-blown field of study that might encompass older fields based on the nation-state or on imperial formations or as a conversation among specialists of different places that allow them to put their works in perspective, while drawing attention to larger contexts. Atlantic history is a development that relates to a larger historiographical development – the so-called spatial turn in which historians have a new interest in space and territory as well as concerns about other traditional topics of historical enquiry that led to the New Social History of the 1960s.⁴ But if geography is merely to replace society or culture as an unthinking category of analysis, we are not moving forward much. It might also form a barrier against connecting with colleagues in European or African history who are as interested in interiority as in large-scale spatial connections. This statement illustrates the perspective largely taken in this book: while there is some evidence that the Atlantic can be usefully looked at as the object of historical enquiry itself (there was such a thing as the Atlantic, if we define it carefully), it is more productive to see the Atlantic World as a simple unit of reference and frame of reference.

I think Atlantic history is an exciting way in which to have conversations with historians whose areas of interest previously did not intersect. But I am conscious of criticisms of Atlantic history as overly imperialistic and Eurocentric in its orientation. In my view, the rise of Atlantic history needs to be viewed alongside the development of hemispheric and continental history and the growing interest in world or global history as exciting new frames of reference that can supplant or supplement the traditional lenses of national or imperial history. All these frames of reference try to complement, overpass or suppress the nation as the most common unit of historical analysis; none corresponds to any kind of political entity. This makes Atlantic history not just different from national history but also different from imperial history, although the new imperial history increasingly consists of a global history of empires that compares imperial formations over time and space and studies their intra- and interrelations. Consequently, all these historiographical currents share in the rise of transnational and trans-imperial history. This work is part of the ongoing historiographical orientation. They differentiate themselves in their objects and in their chronological and geographical scales of comparison. Alan Karras sums up the promise of Atlantic history in a succinct way that underlines the principal premises of this book. He argues that many historical processes like trans-oceanic migration, long-distance trade, religious proselytization, democratic revolution and enlightened state building first appeared during the modern period in the context of the Atlantic World. Thus, these processes ‘point to a significance for Atlantic world history that cannot be underestimated; without the Atlantic world’s history, in fact, there would be no global history’.⁵

However, the fact that, already in the early modern period, the Atlantic World maintained close relationships with the Mediterranean world or Asia via the Philippines or via the Cape of Good Hope; the fact that the intercontinental slave trade linked the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean; the fact that, more globally, the Atlantic European trade was integrated into a world trade connecting most of the continents in the eighteenth century; and the fact that European colonial empires were world empires and not Atlantic ones should not mislead us in minimizing the singularity of the relationships uniting societies from both sides of the Atlantic and to question the Atlantic paradigm. What distinguished the Atlantic World from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries were: the development of a complex labour market after the demographical collapse of Native societies in the Americas; the beginnings of capitalism in Europe and its spread throughout the Atlantic World; the mass migrations of both Africans and Europeans to the New World; the economic exploitation of these various ethnic groups thanks to slavery, forced labour and other forms of labour; the creation of numerous settler colonies and the formation of new multiethnic and multicultural societies born from the encounter of Natives, Europeans and Africans in a colonial situation; and the formation of Atlantic colonial empires.

These Atlantic colonial empires were singular for three reasons: because they linked metropoles and settlers colonies; because in these settler colonies the colonized population was both ‘autochtone’/Native (the Indians) and ‘allochtone’/non-Native (the African slaves); and because the white settlers were in a potential position of being both colonizers towards the Indians and the African slaves and also colonized in their relationship with the metropole. All these phenomena had in return a series of very important impacts on the Old Worlds, both in Africa and in Europe, in the context of the imperial, labour and trade relationships linking the three continents. Thus, the specificity of the Atlantic World lay in the conjunction of these interrelated phenomena, whose entangled effects were not found elsewhere.

A NARRATIVE OF INTERCONNECTIONS

This book takes the above ideas about what Atlantic history as a subject might be about to construct a narrative of interconnections between peoples in the landmasses of the Atlantic basin and upon the Atlantic Ocean between the voyages of Columbus to the New World in the 1490s and the end of the Age of Revolutions around 1830 or 1840. Although it will address the question of how the development of an Atlantic World increased the global importance of Western Europe relative to other parts of the world, this narrative is not a modern version of older historiographies on the rise of the West and the triumph of Western civilization from the Enlightenment onwards. Rather, it stresses the interactive nature of encounters between various parts of the world, showing, for example, that Africa did not just march to a European beat during these centuries, that expansion into the New World was fiercely contested within Europe itself and even more contested outside Europe, and that the new societies developed by Europeans in contestation with Native Americans and African Americans in the Americas had their own ideas of what were the ideal relationships that should be established within a developing Atlantic World order from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries.

An Atlantic approach allows for a fresh perspective to be taken upon major historical events. Studying the Atlantic as an interconnected whole, both dynamic and complex at the same time, rather than focusing upon disparate national histories or individual incidents (though this work will use case studies of local areas and individual predicaments to exemplify larger themes), allows readers to discern better how larger historical patterns emerge from the movement of people, things and ideas across and within the Atlantic Ocean over a long historical period. It also encourages students and readers to think about multi-causal explanations of events and historical processes in ways that are both more accurate renderings of complicated situations and more intellectually satisfying in helping to examine problems with historical relevance and contemporary resonance. This book thus deals with traditional topics applying the techniques and approaches of Atlantic history outlined above. These topics include the age of discovery and the catastrophic consequences of the Columbian exchange; the Atlantic slave trade and the eventual campaign to abolish it; the repopulating of the Americas from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries; war as an increasingly global phenomenon, leading into wars between European empires for global dominance and liberation movements by settlers, slaves and indigenes during the Age of Revolution in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; religious conversion and the development of new syncretic forms of religion in the various regions of the Atlantic World; changing ideas about governance and the relation of individuals to each other and to the state and the ambivalent nature of campaigns for freedom in highly unequal societies; nation-building and nationhood in ages of empires and colonization; the development of settler societies in multiracial and multiethnic societies; the development of Atlantic commerce as part of global trade and merchant capitalism; and the growth of intellectual movements such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism. At bottom, this text looks at how the modern world was born through an examination of the intersection of peoples and worlds colliding in a significant section of the world over a very long time. This work will form an important bridge between works of history that describe what historians sometimes call the world we have lost and works that describe how the world we live in has been shaped by long-standing historical events, themes and processes.

THE ATLANTIC OCEAN

One problem that immediately comes to mind when writing about Atlantic history is that the concept of Atlantic history is an ex-post-facto concept that makes sense to us today but made little sense to most people in the past. Few people living in Africa, Europe and the Americas before 1492 and not many more during the conventional boundaries that we use to date Atlantic history, roughly the mid-fifteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth century, saw themselves as ‘Atlantic peoples’, living in a space that was defined by the Atlantic Ocean. The idea of an Atlantic World predicated on common sharing of Atlantic boundaries would have been close to inconceivable to early modern people seeing themselves as parts of much smaller communities (families, tribes, nations and empires) than a semi-global community with linked concerns and interests. It is we, not they, who have a sense of global consciousness.

An Atlantic history is in part predicated upon identity formation – how peoples interacting with other peoples came to see themselves as Atlantic people and even more importantly how Atlantic interactions created the cultural change that historians describe as either creolization or ethnogenesis. The creation of an Atlantic World from the sixteenth century led to mixed ethnic and racial communities developing at the same time as Atlantic peoples tried hard to insist on their cultural autonomy and cultural distinctiveness. This contradictory set of urges reflects the ‘disembedding’ of individuals and institutions that was the special quality of the Atlantic World. As Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and James Sidbury argue, what was key to Atlantic identity was how ‘members of all groups, whether Amerindians struggling with the disembedding influence of the market through the chaos caused by epidemic disease, Africans facing the upheavals shaped by war, drought, and slavery, or Europeans seeking opportunity through migration, responded by seeking to re-embed themselves into communities, creating new identities rooted in the transformations that forged the early modern Atlantic world’.⁶

A central concept in Atlantic history is fluidity. It is seen most clearly in pre-contact Africa. Most of pre-colonial Africa was dominated by ‘relatively small polities, and they often engaged in aggression with an eye less to territorial aggrandizement than to the acquisition of dependents, since the control of labour, not land, conferred wealth and prestige’. It made pre-colonial Africa characterized by the plasticity and multiplicity of socially constructed identities, which may have helped Africans adapt to horrible oppression in transatlantic slavery. Africans proved especially adept at reconstituting family networks in the Americas, sponsoring, as Herman Bennett notes, urban mutual-aid societies in Latin America or forming mixed Afro-Amerindian communities in the Guianas. What might be most important about African ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction and Acknowledgements
• Part One: History and Historiography
• Part Three: Atlantic Places
• Part Four: Atlantic Themes
• Index
• Imprint