As a field, Atlantic history developed primarily in Anglo-American academia and has consequently produced more information on certain Atlantic regions (and subjects) than on others. The early modern Atlantic World, with its flows of bullion, of free and unfree laborers, of colonial produce and of manufactures from Europe and Asia, with its mercantile networks and rent-seeking capital, has to date been described as a preserve almost entirely of the Western sea-powers. Central and Eastern Europe have been notably absent from the narrative, with few exceptions. The reluctance of the historical profession in these very regions to engage with Atlantic history, and of ‘Western’ scholars to engage with these more eastern regions, has certainly contributed to this state of affairs. In 2009, when Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan published their still very readable critical appraisal of the field of Atlantic history, hardly anyone would have regarded Central and Eastern European history as an area of study for the Atlantic historian. In their introduction, they proclaimed that ‘developments in Central and Eastern Europe … may well be less tightly linked to those in the Atlantic and better approached through other perspectives’. The notion that this part of Europe was not an integral part of the early modern Atlantic economy continues to be prominent in the field to this day.

This attitude is not just characteristic of Anglophone scholarship. Already in 1994, Hans-Heinrich Nolte proclaimed that German scholarship was too ‘self-centered’ to be occupied with such global narratives. In 2002, Sebastian Conrad remarked that German historiography had hardly been touched by globalization and showed a continuing tendency to write history from the perspective of the nation. This tendency, he continued, had in fact intensified after 1989. This is all the more curious, considering that contemporaries in past centuries were perfectly aware of Central and Eastern Europe’s dense entanglements with the Atlantic World. For Abbé Raynal (1713–1796), editor of the Histoire des deux Indes (1770), it was evident that the maritime expansion not only stimulated the economies of European sea-powers, but that more continental territories like those of Prussia and even Russia were also closely involved.