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For a Comprehensive History of the Atlantic World or Histories Connected In and Beyond the Atlantic World?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Cécile Vidal*
Affiliation:
EHESS, MASCIPO - UMR 8168 (CNRS/EHESS)

Abstract

This article deals with the field of Atlantic history, which first rose to prominence in North America in the early 1990s. Based on a critical review of two recently published books that reflect this “new” historiographical current, it presents the various debates dividing the Atlanticist community, including the different ways of conceptualizing the Atlantic world, practicing Atlantic history, and envisioning the future of Atlantic studies. It argues that the Atlantic world should remain a simple historical framework instead of becoming the main object of investigation. The goal is thus to write a situated history that, while taking into account all historical actors, focuses on the redefinition and renegotiation of power relationships among individuals, groups, and socio-political formations in this interconnected world born out of European colonialism and imperialism.

Type
Atlantic History
Copyright
Copyright © Les Éditions de l’EHESS 2012

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Footnotes

*

About Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan, eds, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

References

1. Morgan, Philip D. and Greene, Jack P., “Introduction: The Present State of Atlantic History,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4-5 Google Scholar.

2. Huguette, and Chaunu, Pierre, Séville et l’Atlantique, 1504-1650 (Paris: SEVPEN, 1955-1959), 8 Google Scholar vols.; Godechot, Jacques and Palmer, Robert R., “Le problème de l’Atlantique du XVIIIe au XXe siècle,” in Relazioni del X Congresso internazionale di Scienze Storiche, vol. V, Storia contemporanea (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1955,) 175-239 Google Scholar.

3. The most important European practitioners of this early Atlantic history who had not yet thought of themselves as such were H. Hale Bellot in England, Jacques Godechot, and Pierre Chaunu in France, Jacques Pirenne and Charles Verlinden in Belgium, Vitorino Magalhães Godhino in Portugal, and Max Silberschmidt in Switzerland. For an overview of their work, see Bailyn, Bernard, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” in Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3-30 Google Scholar.

4. From 1995 to 2010, this prestigious American university, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brought together annually a different group of young historians who were writing or had just completed their thesis for a workshop around a particular theme related to the history of the Atlantic world. The program involved 366 young researchers from 202 American universities and 164 foreign universities. See http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/ .

5. Braudel, Fernand, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1979), 3 Google Scholar vols.; Wallerstein, Immanuel, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic Press, 1974-1989), 3 Google Scholar vols.

6. Games, Alison, “Teaching Atlantic History,” Itinerario 23-2 (1999): 163 Google Scholar.

7. Ibid., 167.

8. Ibid., 163.

9. In addition to the works already cited, see: “The Nature of Atlantic History,” special issue, Itinerario 23-2 (1999): 48-174; Dorigny, Marcel, ed., “L’Atlantique,” special issue, Dix-Huitième Siècle 33 (2001)Google Scholar; Pietschmann, Horst, ed., Atlantic History: History of the Atlantic System, 1580-1830 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002)Google Scholar; Games, Alison, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review 111-3 (2006): 741-57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Games, Alison and Rothman, Adam, eds., Major Problems in Atlantic History: Documents and Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008 Google Scholar); Potofsky, Allan, ed., “New Perspectives in the AtlanticProject, History of European Ideas 34-4 (2008): 383-455 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cécile Vidal, ed., “L’histoire atlantique de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique,” Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos, 2008, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/index10233.html ; and Bailyn, Bernard and Denault, Patricia L., eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Structures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009 CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

10. See the typology of different concepts of Atlantic history (“circum-, trans-, cis-Atlantic history”) proposed by Armitage, David, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, eds. Armitage, David and Braddick, Michael J. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11-27 Google Scholar.

11. Coclanis, Peter A., “ Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13-1 (2002): 169-82 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Forum: Beyond the Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63-4 (2006): 675-742; Gervais, Pierre, “Neither Imperial, Nor Atlantic: A Merchant Perspective on International Trade in the Eighteenth Century,” History of European Ideas 34-4 (2008): 465-73 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Griffin, Patrick, “A Plea for a New Atlantic History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68-2 (2011): 236-39 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Jack Greene is now Professor Emeritus in the History Department at The Johns Hopkins University, which spearheaded a “program in Atlantic history and culture” in the late 1960s. Along with Bernard Bailyn, who provided an important contribution to the emergence of Atlantic history when he began his Atlantic History seminar at Harvard University in 1995, Greene is one of two major tutelary figures of American colonial history and the American Revolution, shaping several generations of “colonialists” since the 1970s. Also affiliated with the same history department at Johns Hopkins is Philip Morgan, known as one of the greatest contemporary historians of slavery in the British colonies. Born in Great Britain, where he completed his studies and began his university career, Morgan then migrated to the United States, participating in the very process of internationalization in higher education and research that, according to Bailyn, has played such an essential role in the emergence of Atlantic history. Nicholas Canny, the eminent specialist of early modern Ireland, also crossed the Atlantic several times from his native Ireland to write his thesis and start his career in the United States before taking a position at the National University of Ireland in Galway. Bailyn, Bernard, “Preface,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, eds. Armitage, David and Braddick, Michael J. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), XIV-XX, here XVI-XVII Google Scholar.

14. Egerton, Douglas R. et al., The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Wheeling: Harlan Davidson, 2007 Google Scholar); Benjamin, Thomas, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009 Google Scholar).

15. Greene, Jack P., “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Interpreting Early America: Historiographical Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 17-42 Google Scholar; Canny, Nicholas, “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of British Colonial America,” Journal of American History 86-3 (1999): 1093-114 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Together these two books called upon fifty contributors (of which only three wrote a chapter for both books). Aside from some notable exceptions, a large majority of the authors are native English speakers who hold positions in Anglophone universities. It is regrettable that the books’ editors did not seek to further internationalize Atlantic studies by integrating more European, Caribbean, Latin American, and especially African historians, who are largely underrepresented in these historiographical and editorial enterprises.

17. O’Reilly, William, “Genealogies of Atlantic History,” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical perspectives 1-1 (2004): 66-84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours.

18. Dubois, Laurent, “The French Atlantic,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 167 Google Scholar.

19. Canny, Nicholas, “Atlantic History and Global History,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 317 Google Scholar.

20. Greene and Morgan, “Introduction,” 4-5.

21. Elliott, John H., “Afterword: Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, eds. Armitage, David and Braddick, Michael J. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 240 Google Scholar.

22. Canny, “Atlantic History and Global History,” 320.

23. Games, “Teaching Atlantic History,” 167-68.

24. Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” 16; Games, “Atlantic History,” 745-46 and 754-55; Greene and Morgan, “Introduction,” 7; and Elliott, “Afterword,” 237-38.

25. Rodger, Nicholas Andrew Martin, “Atlantic Seafaring,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 71 Google Scholar.

26. For works on communications in the Atlantic world, see: Steele, Ian K., The English Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Banks, Kenneth J., Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

27. Gabaccia, Donna, “A Long Atlantic in the Wider World,” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives 1-1 (2004): 10 Google Scholar.

28. Bushnell, Amy Turner, “Indigenous America and the Limits of the Atlantic World, 1493-1825,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 191-221 Google Scholar. See also: Cohen, Paul, “Was there an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European Ideas 34-4 (2008): 388-410 Google Scholar; Hämäläinen, Pekka, “Lost in Transitions: Suffering, Survival, and Belonging in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68-2 (2011): 219-23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Saunt, Claudio, “‘Our Indians’: European Empires and the History of the Native American South,” in The Atlantic in Global History, 1500-2000, eds. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge and Seeman, Erik R. (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 60-75 Google Scholar.

29. Richter, Daniel K., Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 41 Google Scholar.

30. On indigenous migrations in North America, see notably Calloway, Colin G., New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 Google Scholar). Among the numerous works on the Indians in Europe, see: Hinderaker, Eric, “The Four Indian Kings and the Imaginative Construction of the First British Empire,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53-3 (1996): 487-526 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vaughan, Alden T., Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009 Google Scholar).

31. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip, “Introduction: The Making and Unmaking of an Atlantic World,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32. The continental scale also allows one to take into better account the Pacific coast and relations between the Americas and Asia. See: Mapp, Paul W., “Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives,” The William and Mary Quarterly 58-4 (2006): 713-24 Google Scholar; Wood, Peter H., “From Atlantic History to a Continental Approach,” The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 279-98 Google Scholar. For a recent example of the continental approach, see Mapp, Paul W., The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire, 1713-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

33. Richter, Daniel K. and Thompson, Troy L., “Severed Connections: American Indigenous Peoples and the Atlantic World in an Era of Imperial Transformation,” The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 499 Google Scholar.

34. For a comparison of the differentiated impact of the Atlantic dynamics on Europe, the Americas, and Africa, see the three essays in “Old Worlds and the Atlantic,” the second part of Morgan and Greene’s book: Morgan, Jack P. and Greene, Philip D., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2008), 189-275 Google Scholar.

35. Eltis, David, “Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade, Mid-Seventeenth to Mid-Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 271 Google Scholar.

36. Curtin, Philip D., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969)Google Scholar; “Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,” http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces .

37. Burnard, Trevor, “Review: Empire Matters? The Historiography of Imperialism in Early America, 1492-1830,” History of European Ideas, 33-1 (2007): 100 Google Scholar.

38. Morgan, Philip D., “Africa and the Atlantic, c. 1450 to c. 1820,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 241 Google Scholar.

39. From this point of view, see Schaub, Jean-Frédéric, “Violence in the Atlantic: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 113-29 Google Scholar. This interesting article presents a unique contribution to this volume because Schaub is the only author to insist on the process of destruction as opposed to that of creation and because he is one of the rare historians to take European societies into account. He emphasizes the simultaneous and correlative growth of violence on both sides of the Atlantic but without examining how relations became violent in Native-American and African cultures.

40. Canny and Morgan, “Introduction,” 2.

41. On the notion of colonial situation, see the seminal article by Balandier, Georges, “La situation coloniale : approche théorique,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11 (1951) : 44-79 Google Scholar.

42. Putnam, Lara, “To Study the Fragment/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Social History 39-3 (2006): 615-30 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Scott, Rebecca J., “Small-Scale Dynamics of Large-Scale Processes,” American Historical Review 105-2 (2000): 472-79 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Burnard, Trevor, “The British Atlantic,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 130 Google Scholar.

44. Rubiés, Joan-Pau, “The Worlds of Europeans, Africans, and Americans, c. 1490,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21 Google Scholar.

45. “Section One: New Atlantic Worlds,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 53-187 Google Scholar.

46. Schwartz, Stuart B., “The Iberian Atlantic to 1650,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 147-64 Google Scholar; Klooster, Wim, “The Northern European Atlantic World,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 165-80 Google Scholar; Chaplin, Joyce E., “The British Atlantic,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 219-34 Google Scholar; and Marzagalli, Silvia, “The French Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 235-51 Google Scholar.

47. For a reconsideration of empires in the Atlantic, see: Burnard, , “Review: Empire Matters?”; Zuniga, Jean-Paul, “L’histoire impériale à l’heure de l’histoire globale. Une perspective atlantique,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 54-4/5 (2007): 54-68 Google Scholar; Grasso, Christopher and Wulf, Karin, “Nothing Says Democracy Like a Visit from the Queen: Reflections on Empire and Nation in Early American Histories,” Journal of American History 95-3 (2008): 764-81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Vidal, Cécile, “Le(s) monde(s) atlantique(s), l’Atlantique français, l’empire atlantique français,” Outre-Mers. Revue d’Histoire, 97-362/ 363 (2009): 7-37 Google Scholar.

48. No chapter is devoted specifically to the Dutch Atlantic, but the Dutch are included in the chapter by Wim Klooster on “The Northern European Atlantic World,” in the section covering the period from 1450-1650, and it is listed in a number of other essays. For an excellent article analyzing why historians pay so little attention to the Dutch Atlantic as well as the emergence and rapid collapse of a Dutch Atlantic empire under the leadership of the Dutch West India Company in the middle of the seventeenth century, see Schmidt, Benjamin, “The Dutch Atlantic: From Provincialism to Globalism,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 163-87 Google Scholar. The article also examines the following subjects: how the Dutch Atlantic was reconfigured with a weaker mercantilist and imperialist orientation and the simultaneous opportunity for Dutch expansion beyond the Atlantic world, both of which allow the relationships between Atlantic history, imperial history, and world history to be reconsidered.

49. Chaplin, “The British Atlantic.” See also the excellent chapter on the emergence of the term “Atlantic”: Chaplin, Joyce E., “The Atlantic Ocean and Its Contemporary Meanings, 1492-1808,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35-51 Google Scholar.

50. Russell-Wood, A. J. R., “The Portuguese Atlantic World, c.1650-c.1760,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 212 Google Scholar.

51. Law, Robin, “Africa in the Atlantic World, c.1760-c.1840,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 589 Google Scholar.

52. Berlin, Ira, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-American Society in Mainland North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53-2 (1996): 254 Google Scholar, note 8.

53. Canny and Morgan, “Introduction,” 13.

54. Herzog, Tamar, “Identities and Processes of Identification in the Atlantic World,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 480-95 Google Scholar.

55. Canny and Morgan, “Introduction,” 1.

56. Mancke, Elizabeth, “Polity Formation and Atlantic Political Narratives,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 383 Google Scholar.

57. François-Joseph Ruggiu, “L’histoire comparée, méthode historique, pratique d’écriture” (unpublished paper presented at a symposium on comparative and intersecting history, EHESS, Paris, France, June 2, 2010).

58. Shields, David, “The Atlantic World, the Senses, and the Arts,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 130-46 Google Scholar.

59. Of the two essays that mention the term slavery in their title, one is primarily dedicated to the slave trade and the other mainly to abolitionism, rather than the slave systems themselves: Eltis, , “Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade”; Christopher Leslie Brown, “Slavery and Antislavery, 1760-1820,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 602-17 Google Scholar. Another chapter raises the questions of workforce control and the labor market from the crucial angle of migration: O’Reilly, William, “Movements of People in the Atlantic World, 1450-1850,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 305-23 Google Scholar.

60. Sylvia Frey, “Beyond Borders: Revisiting Atlantic History” (unpublished paper presented at an international workshop on Louisiana and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, EHESS/Tulane University, October 2007 and April 2008).

61. On the two slave trades, see Eltis, “Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade.” On the spatial dimension of the indigenous experience and interactions between Indians and Europeans, see Bushnell, “Indigenous America.”

62. On hemispheric history, see Greene, Jack P., “Comparing Early Modern Worlds: Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective,” History Compass 1-1 (2003)Google Scholar, http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/1478-0542.026 ; Greene, Jack P., “Hemispheric History and Atlantic History,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Greene, Jack P. and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 299-315 Google Scholar. See also: Levander, Caroline F. and Levine, Robert S., eds., Hemispheric American Studies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Hinderaker, Eric and Horn, Rebecca, “Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas,” The William and Mary Quarterly 67-3 (2010): 395-432 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63. The chapters on the French Atlantic in both books present a rare exception: Dubois, “The French Atlantic”; Silvia Marzagalli, “The French Atlantic World.” It is perhaps explained by the ongoing debate in France on the integration of national history and colonial history.

64. Stoler, Ann Laura and Cooper, Frederick, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

65. Hall, Catherine, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Wilson, Kathleen, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Hall, Catherine and Rose, Sonya O., eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66. Morgan, Philip D., “British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa 1600-1780,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, eds. Bailyn, Bernard and Morgan, Philip D. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 157-219 Google Scholar.

67. Molineux, Catherine A., Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

68. Morgan and Greene, “Introduction,” 16.

69. On the English Revolutions, see: Pestana, Carla Gardner, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Pincus, Steven C.A., 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

70. However, David Geggus’s chapter on “The Atlantic Revolution in Atlantic Perspective” (in Canny and Morgan, 533-49) raises the question of the complex relations between the French and Haitian Revolutions.

71. Greene and Morgan, “Introduction,” 13; Canny and Morgan, “Introduction,” 9-10.

72. Rothschild, Emma, “Late Atlantic History,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Canny, Nicholas and Morgan, Philip D. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 634-48 Google Scholar.

73. McNeil, J. R., “The End of the Old Atlantic World: America, Africa, Europe, 1770-1888,” in Atlantic American Societies: From Colombus Through Abolition, 1492 to 1888, eds. Karras, Alan L. and McNeil, John Robert (London: Routledge, 1992), 245-68 Google Scholar; Fogleman, Aaron Spencer, “The Transformation of the Atlantic World, 1776-1867,” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical perspectives 6-1 (2009): 5-28 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sanders, James E., “Atlantic Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century Columbia: Spanish America’s Challenge to the Contours of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 20-1 (2009): 131-50 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kaye, Anthony E., “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75-3 (2009): 627-50 Google Scholar. For authors who advocate a more extended timeline, see: Gabaccia, , “A Long Atlantic in the Wider World”; Cañizares-Esguerra, and Seeman, , The Atlantic in Global History; and Falola, Toyin and Roberts, Kevin D., eds., The Atlantic World, 1450-2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008 Google Scholar).

74. Games, “Atlantic History,” 747 and 751-52.

75. For a similar perspective in an imperial framework, see Amussen, Susan Dwyer, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 11 Google Scholar.

76. This game of prepositions (of, around, within, beyond) is far from unusual. From the beginning, Atlanticists have discussed different types of Atlantic history in this way. See Games, “Atlantic History,” 745; Greene and Morgan, “Introduction,” 10.

77. Bentley, Jerry H., “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89-2 (1999): 215-24 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500-1640,” American Historical Review 112-5 (2007): 1383 Google Scholar.

79. Elliott, “Afterword,” 239.