Jane Landers

My H-Net review of this textbook, found at:

http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=26172

Douglas Egerton, Alison Games, Donald R. Wright, Kris E. Lane, Jane G. Landers. The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888. Wheeling: Harlan Davidson Incorporated, 2007. 500 pp. $48.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-88295-245-1.

Reviewed by Gene R. Tucker (The University of Texas at Arlington)
Published on H-TGS (April, 2010)
Commissioned by Thomas Adam

The Interconnected Atlantic World

Using the Atlantic Ocean as an organizing principle has become very popular among historians in the last decade. Whether called “Atlantic history” or “transatlantic history,” the study of the linkages between peoples across the Atlantic basin has led to numerous essay collections, conferences, an H-Net discussion network, and even a popular coffee-table book titled Atlantic Ocean: The Illustrated History of the Ocean That Changed the World (2008). This work, The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888, is the first comprehensive textbook geared to the increasing number of college courses (and programs) dedicated to the history of the peoples of the Atlantic world. The book successfully portrays the interconnectedness of people, commodities, and events across the Atlantic, much as Fernand Braudel did with the Mediterranean decades ago, though, like any textbook of such breadth, there are some minor weaknesses.

The authors begin with a short historiographical introduction, defining the Atlantic world, the scope of the textbook, and (all too briefly) the major historians who first used the Atlantic as a unifying concept. The book focuses on “the societies transformed by the convergence of cultures following Christopher Columbus’s momentous voyage in 1492” (p. 1), which includes civilizations far from the Atlantic’s shore, such as the Inca in Peru, Amerindians along the Great Lakes, or Africans deep in the interior. The authors stress direct encounters between people and even the indirect effects of events on discrete peoples in the four continents touching the Atlantic. These connections and encounters pay little heed to political boundaries. The five authors note that historians “frequently force transnational sagas into artificial political frameworks” (p. 2), and that they will instead “explore commonalities and convergences, seeking larger patterns derived from the interactions of people around, within, and across the Atlantic” (pp. 2-3). The authors choose to begin their narrative around 1400 and finish with the end of slavery in the Western Hemisphere in 1888.

Chapter 1 presents a geographical, political, and socioeconomic overview of the Atlantic on the eve of Portugal’s expansion and Columbus’s 1492 voyage. The authors decide to stress the similarities among peoples in Africa, Europe, and the Americas, not the “superficial differences that often shocked contemporaries” (p. 17). Their notions of what these societies had in common, however, are decidedly vague. The authors say each society engaged in agriculture, trade, politics, and religion. This is true of every civilization. In chapter 2 the authors lay the basis for an “Atlantic System,” noting that the European desire for exotic trade goods like spices and sugar led to exploration in the Atlantic. They also correctly note that there were ordered states and civilizations ready to greet the Europeans in the Americas and Africa such as the Kongo and the Inca--the Europeans did not simply dictate to or oppress barbarous natives; they negotiated with similarly advanced peoples. Still, the second chapter ends with Columbus in the Caribbean, and the third begins with Spain’s expansion into the Americas--not an Aztec discovery of Spain or a Beninese discovery of Brazil. The authors emphasize why Europeans sought to explore beyond their horizons: commercial expansion (“it could well have been about cod in Newfoundland rather than gold in the Caribbean,” p. 73), but they fail to explain how it was that Europeans, and not Amerindians or Africans (or Asians, for that matter), were capable and willing to explore beyond their shores. Several fairly recent, and popular, books offer prospective answers, from the geographical-biological explanations of Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) to the sociopolitical musings of David Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998). Even older works such as Frederick Turner’s Beyond Geography (1983) proffer “spiritual” and religious motivations for European expansion. The weight that the five authors give to similarities among Africans, Amerindians, and Europeans perhaps leads them to ignore a fundamental difference, namely that although Europeans were never unbridled, omnipotent masters in their dealings with other peoples, they were, nevertheless, often the protagonists in the Atlantic story.

In chapters 3 and 4, the authors explore the repercussions of European expansion into the Americas and Africa. Chapter 3 discusses the early empires of Spain and Portugal in the New World. The authors place due importance on European use of mixed-race and multilingual people as cultural mediators, from Afro-Portuguese on the east side of the Atlantic to people like Malintzin on the western shores. These cultural and ethnic mestizos facilitated trade, political alliances, and conquest throughout the Atlantic, often becoming successful in two worlds. The authors also note that the Spanish and Portuguese were successful in the New World because they placed themselves at the top of existing imperial structures. The Spanish did not dismantle Aztec or Incan states and replace them with Spanish models; they reaped the benefits of extant political and labor hierarchies, creating a new, hybridized society. Iberian success in the Americas prompted other Europeans, such as the English, French, and Dutch, to try their hand at extracting value directly from the wider Atlantic world, transferring European competition to both Africa and America. The role of unfree labor in this process is discussed in chapters 5 and 6. Disease and slavery played havoc on the numbers and structures of several Amerindian groups and the concurrent increase in the use of African slave labor dramatically changed the continent of Africa, as African polities struggled to continue the lucrative and advantageous trade in humans with the Spanish, Portuguese, and, increasingly, the British and the Dutch (a trade that was carried out on African, not European, terms). The authors also discuss European migration to and settlement in the American continents and the changing, but ever-present, trading and political accommodations with native American nations. The five authors highlight that unfree labor systems existed not only among the Europeans (slavery and indentured servitude) but among Amerindians and Africans as well.

Chapters 7 and 8 underscore the role played by trade and “racial and cultural mixture” in the Atlantic world. Trade, many Europeans found, was more transformative than religion in changing the habits of natives. Commodities such as tobacco forged not only new relationships between disparate peoples but altered societies across the Atlantic, as everyone from English plowmen and African slaves in Brazil all clamored for the wonderfully “noxious weed.” The authors also note the rise of new cultures in the Atlantic world: “Despite attempts to create a ‘New’ Spain--or France, Holland, Sweden, or England--in the Americas, the linking of the Atlantic world resulted in the creation of numerous mixed and creole, or locally born, populations with distinct, often non-European cultural characteristics” (pp. 256-257). Chapter 9 details the “shrinking Atlantic” as political and military upheavals in one area (often Europe) had repercussions in the Americas and Africa. These events call attention to the very interconnectedness of the Atlantic region, as Abenaki Indians, for instance, attacked English settlements in North America as allies of the French in a war concerning the succession to the Hapsburg throne. Chapters 10, 11, and 12 discuss the revolutions that rocked the Atlantic world, from America to France, Haiti, and Latin America. Again, stress is placed on the notion that these revolutions were not merely “national” in scope, but that they all had intense and important reverberations throughout the Atlantic basin. The American, French, and Haitian revolutions all concerned varying interpretations of personal freedom and liberty, notions not lost on the enslaved African laborers of the Atlantic world. The Haitian Revolution, which resulted in a “Black Republic,” was the impetus for resistance and revolution among slaves of African descent from the United States to New Granada.

In chapter 13, the five authors discuss, only too quickly, the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism. Market revolutions, new industrial technologies, and the associated increase in transatlantic immigration and trade is presented as a result of an interconnected Atlantic society. Textile production in Britain is tied to cotton farming in the U.S. South; the cessation of the transatlantic slave trade is tied to vast internal migrations of slaves in the Americas; new commercial tastes in Europe and less slave labor are tied to changing African farming practices; advances in transportation in the northern Atlantic are tied to the lack of industrial growth Latin America. All of these trans-oceanic changes spotlight the connected nature of societies across national frontiers and highlight the narrowness of strictly national histories. Chapter 14, the last in the book, takes the story to 1888, when the Empire of Brazil legally abolished slavery. The economic imperatives of capitalism and new social sensibilities in Europe and the United States are the primary factors in the story of abolition, though the end of slavery brings about new questions in the labor market and engenders a change in the political relations between peoples on both sides of the Atlantic.

For scholars of German migrations to the New World, the book offers only a paucity of references. The index provides only one reference to Germans and two to pre-1492 Germanic peoples. Though a table on “European Migrants to the Americas, 1500-1800” (p. 161) notes that more German-speakers migrated to the New World than French-speakers, the text only states that “German-speaking migrants headed primarily for British American destinations” (p. 161). In one place (p. 267) the authors describe the German penchant for retaining their language and customs in places like Pennsylvania, though any reason for this is left unexplored. One page later, the authors do make a cogent observation concerning the transfer, retention, and hybridization of culture, as well as the creation of ethnic identities: “In regions where Europeans from different kingdoms settled in proximity, historians find more evidence of local formulation, rather than pristine transplanting, of ethnic identity. In North America, German-speakers from discrete kingdoms and principalities in the Holy Roman Empire became known as ‘Germans,’ and the polyglot people of New Netherland, some of them Portuguese Jews, became ‘Dutch.’ The creation of ethnic identity was a complex process of interaction not only with inhabitants of the colonies, but also the exigencies of a new environment” (p. 268). In the chapter on industrialization in the nineteenth century, the authors give very scant attention to the cultural transfers and interactions of the new transnational migrants, though the example of one John Christian Zimmerman from the state of Berg (p. 447) is portrayed as a typical nineteenth-century business traveler. This lack of attention to transatlantic European migration in the nineteenth century is perhaps due to the authors' focus on unfree labor and their arbitrary decision to end their narrative in 1888, before the intense immigration from eastern and southern Europe that peaked in the twentieth century.

The five authors of The Atlantic World have ably accomplished the daunting task of narrating a history of such geographic scope and chronological breadth, though there are a few faults in their approach and story. Some of the maps are rather sparse and unhelpful. One, on European religious divisions circa 1560 (p. 118), presents all of Britain and Holland as “Anglican/Calvinist influenced.” Unfortunately, the color scheme also depicts North Africa as “Anglican/Calvinist influenced,” though Geneva, Greece, and Russia are all firmly Roman Catholic! The authors devote most of a chapter to the transatlantic ramifications of the United States’ Revolutionary War (chapter 10), though the nation’s 1787 constitutional convention is ignored as a merely national matter (p. 4). Despite this declaration, the same U.S. Constitution is later presented as part of an Atlantic-wide reactionary trend at the end of the eighteenth-century. Surely such inconsistencies can be chalked up to the fact that five authors collaborated on the book.

The most glaring blemish of the book is the sometimes palpable anti-European bias in the narrative. This is perhaps due to the fact that none of the authors specialize in European history: two authors work on colonial American history while the other three specialize primarily in Africa, Africans, and peoples of African descent in the Americas. The authors do note that they “hope to redress the conventional neglect of Africa and Africans in Atlantic histories” (p. 5). This is not an unwelcome perspective, as this work laudably succeeds in bringing the contributions West Africans made to Atlantic history into focus, but some attempts at “redress” are confusing. In one sidebar, the authors make the bold contention: “If Spanish and English authorities considered using marriage to bring about political alliances or cement loyalty of people in distant locations, they may have come up with the idea from West Africans” (p. 314), though marriage as a political tool was a worldwide and age-old phenomenon. The authors commendably state their intention to dispense with hoary racialist and ethnocentric theories about non-European peoples, disdainfully quoting Hugh Trevor-Roper’s statement that the African past consisted of nothing but “unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes” (p. 18). In the same paragraph, however, the authors derisively note that “if one were inclined to seek the most glaring examples of unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes, the European-initiated Crusades might vie for top ranking” (p. 18). Though the authors rightly note (pp. 158-159) that all societies, Amerindian, African, and European, had a form of status akin to slavery, when they describe the Abenaki abduction of the Johnson family from New Hampshire in 1754, they write that the “Indians adopted six-year-old Sylvanus” (p. 292). His mother, Susanna Johnson, would probably not have used such a kind word as “adoption.” The oddest example of bias comes from a sidebar on names. The article points out that scholars often mistakenly called the nation of Haiti “St. Domingo”; that many write “L’Ouverture” when Toussaint only wrote his surname as “Louverture”; and that though people often write “Genêt,” the Frenchman instead wrote his name “Edmond Charles Genet,” without the circumflex. The sidebar bitterly and senselessly concludes: “Typical is David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning John Adams (2001), which commits all three errors; one wonders how many awards the biography would have garnered if its author, along with the editors at Simon and Schuster, could not correctly spell ‘Britain’ or ‘Monroe’ or some other name that white scholars perceive as important” (p. 374). One wonders if the authors actually believe “white scholars” are genetically or socially predisposed to misspelling nouns they find unimportant, or why such “white scholars” would not think the white Frenchman Genet was anything but important.

Still, The Atlantic World is quite successful in portraying the Atlantic world as a region of complicated, interlocking social, political, and economic networks. The five authors have created an important and accessible textbook for undergraduates. It is relatively inexpensive and easy to read; it also contains numerous vignettes, entertaining sidebars, black and white maps and illustrations, and fairly extensive bibliographies at the end of each chapter. For graduate courses, it may serve as a decent background primer, but it would behoove graduate students to wrestle with the ideas in the more focused secondary sources the authors point to in their work. For scholars unacquainted with the Atlantic as an organizing principle for historical study, the book is an excellent introduction. Hopefully, these five authors, or their colleagues, will bring the history of the Atlantic up to the present day in a subsequent text.

Citation: Gene R. Tucker. Review of Egerton, Douglas; Games, Alison; Wright, Donald R.; Lane, Kris E.; Landers, Jane G., The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888. H-TGS, H-Net Reviews. April, 2010.

URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=26172

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