Atlantic history is a specialty field in

history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...

that studies the

Atlantic World The Atlantic World comprises the interactions among the peoples and empires bordering the Atlantic Ocean rim from the beginning of the Age of Discovery to the early 19th century. Atlantic history is split between three different contexts: trans-A ...

in the early modern period. The Atlantic World was created by the discovery of a new land by Europeans, and Atlantic History is the study of that world. It is premised on the idea that, following the rise of sustained

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...

an contact with the

New World The term ''New World'' is often used to mean the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere, specifically the Americas."America." ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'' (). McArthur, Tom, ed., 1992. New York: Oxford University Press, p. ...

in the 16th century, the continents that bordered the

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe ...

—the

Americas The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World. Along with th ...

, and

Africa Africa is the world's second-largest and second-most populous continent, after Asia in both cases. At about 30.3 million km2 (11.7 million square miles) including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of Earth's total surface area ...

—constituted a regional system or common sphere of economic and cultural exchange that can be studied as a totality. Its theme is the complex interaction between Europe (especially Great Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal) and their colonies in the Americas. It encompasses a wide range of demographic, social, economic, political, legal, military, intellectual and religious topics treated in comparative fashion by looking at both sides of the Atlantic. Religious revivals in Britain and Germany are studies, as well as the

First Great Awakening The First Great Awakening (sometimes Great Awakening) or the Evangelical Revival was a series of Christian revivals that swept Britain and its thirteen North American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s. The revival movement permanently affecte ...

in the

Thirteen Colonies The Thirteen Colonies, also known as the Thirteen British Colonies, the Thirteen American Colonies, or later as the United Colonies, were a group of British colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America. Founded in the 17th and 18th cent ...

Emigration Emigration is the act of leaving a resident country or place of residence with the intent to settle elsewhere (to permanently leave a country). Conversely, immigration describes the movement of people into one country from another (to permanent ...

race Race, RACE or "The Race" may refer to: * Race (biology), an informal taxonomic classification within a species, generally within a sub-species * Race (human categorization), classification of humans into groups based on physical traits, and/or s ...

and

slavery Slavery and enslavement are both the state and the condition of being a slave—someone forbidden to quit one's service for an enslaver, and who is treated by the enslaver as property. Slavery typically involves slaves being made to perf ...

are also important topics.O'Reilly, (2004) Researchers of Atlantic history typically focus on the interconnections and exchanges between these regions and the civilizations they harbored. In particular, they argue that the boundaries between

nation states A nation state is a political unit where the state and nation are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group. A nation, in the sense of a common ethnicity, may i ...

which traditionally determined the limits of older historiography should not be applied to such transnational phenomena as

colonialism Colonialism is a practice or policy of control by one people or power over other people or areas, often by establishing colony, colonies and generally with the aim of economic dominance. In the process of colonisation, colonisers may impose the ...

missionary A missionary is a member of a religious group which is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thomas Hale 'On Being a Mi ...

activity and

economic expansion An economic expansion is an increase in the level of economic activity, and of the goods and services available. It is a period of economic growth as measured by a rise in real GDP. The explanation of fluctuations in aggregate economic activit ...

Environmental history Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa. Environmental history first emerged in the United States out of th ...

and the study of

historical demography Historical demography is the quantitative study of human population in the past. It is concerned with population size, with the three basic components of population change (fertility, mortality, and migration), and with population characteristi ...

also play an important role, as many key questions in the field revolve around the ecological and epidemiological impact of the Columbian exchange. Robert R. Palmer, an American historian of the

French Revolution The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...

, pioneered the concept in the 1950s with a wide-ranging comparative history of how numerous nations experienced what he called ''The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800'' (1959 and 1964). In this monumental work, he did not compare the French and the

American Revolution The American Revolution was an ideological and political revolution that occurred in British America between 1765 and 1791. The Americans in the Thirteen Colonies formed independent states that defeated the British in the American Revoluti ...

s as successful models against other types of revolutions. Indeed, he developed a wider understanding of the changes that were led by revolutionary processes across the Western civilization. Such work followed in the footsteps of

C. L. R. James Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989),Fraser, C. Gerald, '' The New York Times'', 2 June 1989. who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist and Marxist. His works are i ...

who, in the 1930s, connected Caribbean with European history. Since the 1980s Atlantic history has emerged as an increasingly popular alternative to the older discipline of imperial history, although it could be argued that the field is simply a refinement and reorientation of traditional

historiography Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians ha ...

dealing with the interaction between early modern Europeans and native peoples in the Atlantic sphere. The organization of Atlantic History as a recognized area of historiography began in the 1980s under the impetus of American historians Bernard Bailyn of Harvard University and

Jack P. Greene Jack Philip Greene (born August 12, 1931) is an American historian, specializing in Colonial American history and Atlantic history. Greene was born in Lafayette, Indiana and received his PhD from Duke University in 1956. He spent most of his car ...

of Johns Hopkins University, among others. The post-World War II integration of the European Union and the continuing importance of

NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two No ...

played an indirect role in stimulating interest throughout the 1990s.

Development of the field

Bernard Bailyn's Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World promoted social and demographic studies, and especially regarding demographic flows of population into colonial America. As a leading advocate of the history of the Atlantic world, Bailyn has organized an annual international seminar at Harvard designed to promote scholarship in this field. Professor Bailyn was the promoter of
The International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825
at Harvard University. This was one of the first, and most important, academic initiatives to launch the Atlantic perspective. From 1995-2010 the Atlantic History Seminar sponsored an annual meeting of young historians engaged in creative research on aspects of Atlantic History. In all, 366 young historians came through the Seminar program, 202 from universities in the US and 164 from universities abroad. Its purpose was to advance the scholarship of young historians of many nations interested in the common, comparative, and interactive aspects of the lives of the peoples in the lands that are part of the Atlantic basin, mainly in the early modern period in order to contribute to the study of this transnational historical subject. Bailyn's ''Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours'' (2005) explores the borders and contents of the emerging field, which emphasizes cosmopolitan and multicultural elements that have tended to be neglected or considered in isolation by traditional historiography dealing with the Americas. Bailyn's reflections stem in part from his seminar at Harvard since the mid-1980s. Other important scholars are Jack Greene, who directed a program at Johns Hopkins in Atlantic History from 1972 to 1992 that has now expanded to global concerns.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman Karen Ordahl Kupperman (born 23 April 1939) is an American historian who specializes in colonial history in the Atlantic world of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Biography Karen Ordahl Kupperman was born in Devils Lake, North Dakota on ...

established the Atlantic Workshop at New York University in 1997. Other scholars in the field include

Ida Altman Ida Louise Altman (born 1950) is an American historian of early modern Spain and Latin America. Her book ''Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century'' received the 1990 Herbert E. Bolton Prize of the Confer ...

, Kenneth J. Andrien, David Armitage, Trevor Burnard, Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Nicholas Canny, Philip D. Curtin, Laurent Dubois, J.H. Elliott, David Eltis, Alison Games, Eliga H. Gould,

Anthony Grafton Anthony Thomas Grafton (born May 21, 1950) is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He i ...

Joseph C. Miller Joseph Calder Miller (April 30, 1939 – March 12, 2019) was an American historian and academic. He served at the University of Virginia from 1972 to 2014 as T. Cary Johnson Jr. professor of history, and was a fellow of the American Academy of Art ...

, Philip D. Morgan,

Anthony Pagden Anthony Robin Dermer Pagden (born May 27, 1945) is an author and professor of political science and history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Biography Anthony Pagden is the son of John Brian Dermer Pagden and Joan Mary Pagden. Mr Pa ...

, Jennifer L. Anderson, John Thornton, James D. Tracy, Carla G. Pestana, Isaac Land, Richard S. Dunn, and Ned C. Landsman.

Perspectives

Alison Games (2006) explores the convergence of the multiple strands of scholarly interest that have generated the new field of Atlantic history, which takes as its geographic unit of analysis the Atlantic Ocean and the four continents that surround it. She argues Atlantic history is best approached as a slice of world history. The Atlantic, moreover, is a region that has logic as a unit of historical analysis only within a limited chronology. An Atlantic perspective can help historians understand changes within the region that a more limited geographic framework might obscure. Attempts to write a Braudelian Atlantic history, one that includes and connects the entire region, remain elusive, driven in part by methodological impediments, by the real disjunction that characterized the Atlantic's historical and geographic components, by the disciplinary divisions that discourage historians from speaking to and writing for each other, and by the challenge of finding a vantage point that is not rooted in any single place.Games (2006)

Colonial studies

One impetus for Atlantic studies began in the 1960s with the historians of slavery who started tracking the routes of the

transatlantic slave trade The Atlantic slave trade, transatlantic slave trade, or Euro-American slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and i ...

. A second source came from historians who studied the colonial history of the United States. Many were trained in early modern European history and were familiar with the

historiography of the British Empire The historiography of the British Empire refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of Britain's empire. Historians and their ideas are the main focus here; specific lands and histori ...

, which had been introduced a century before by George Louis Beer and

Charles McLean Andrews Charles McLean Andrews (February 22, 1863 – September 9, 1943) was an American historian, an authority on American colonial history.Roth, David M., editor, and Grenier, Judith Arnold, associate editor, "Connecticut History and Culture: An Histo ...

. Historians studying colonialism have long been open to interdisciplinary perspectives, such as comparative approaches. In addition there was a frustration involved in writing about very few people in a small remote colony. Atlantic history opens the horizon to large forces at work over great distances.

Criticism

Some critics have complained that Atlantic history is little more than imperial history under another name. It has been argued that it is too expansive in claiming to subsume both of the American continents, Africa, and Europe, without seriously engaging with them. According to Caroline Dodds Pennock, indigenous people are often seen as static recipients of transatlantic encounter, despite the fact that thousands of Native Americans crossed the ocean during the sixteenth century, some by choice. Canadian scholar Ian K. Steele argued that Atlantic history will tend to draw students interested in exploring their country's historian beyond

national myth A national myth is an inspiring narrative or anecdote about a nation's past. Such myths often serve as important national symbols and affirm a set of national values. A national myth may sometimes take the form of a national epic or be incorpor ...

s, while offering historical support for such 21st century policies as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Organization of American States (OAS), the

North Atlantic Treaty Organization The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the North Atlantic Alliance, is an intergovernmental military alliance between 30 member states – 28 European and two No ...

(NATO), the New Europe, Christendom, and even the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is an intergovernmental organization whose stated purposes are to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, achieve international cooperation, and be a centre for harmoniz ...

(UN). He concludes, "The early modern Atlantic can even be read as a natural antechamber for American‐led globalization of capitalism and serve as an historical challenge to the coalescing New Europe. No wonder that the academic reception of the new Atlantic history has been enthusiastic in the United States, and less so in Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal, where histories of national Atlantic empires continue to thrive."Ian K. Steele, "Featured Reviews" in ''American Historical Review'' (Dec. 2009) v.114#5, pp. 1405–

/ref>

Notes

Bibliography

*Altman, Ida. ''Emigrants and Society: Extremadura and Spanish America in the Sixteenth Century''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. * Altman, Ida. ''Transatlantic Ties in the Spanish Empire: Brihuega, Spain, and Puebla, Mexico, 1560–1620''. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. * Altman, Ida and James J. Horn, eds. ''"To Make America": European Emigration in the Early Modern Period''. Berkeley:

University of California Press The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by facult ...

, 1991. * Armitage, David, and Michael J. Braddick, eds., ''The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800'' (2002); see especially the lead article by Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History." *Anderson, Jennifer L. ''Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America'' (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). * Bailyn, Bernard. ''Voyagers to the West: a passage in the peopling of America on the eve of the Revolution'' Knopf 1986, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History * Bailyn, Bernard.
Atlantic History: Concept and Contours
' (2005). . * Bodle, Wayne. "Atlantic History Is the New 'New Social History.'" ''William and Mary Quarterly'' 2007 64(1): 203–220. * Canny, Nicholas, and Philip Morgan, eds., ''The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450–1850'' (2011) * Curtin, Philip D.
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History
' (1998) * Egerton, Douglas R. et al. ''The Atlantic World: A History, 1400–1888'' (2007), college textbook; 530 pp. * Elliott, John H. ''Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830'' (2007), 608 pp., . * Eltis, David. ''The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas'' (2000). * Fernlund, Kevin Jon. "American Exceptionalism or Atlantic Unity? Frederick Jackson Turner and the Enduring Problem of American Historiography." ''New Mexico Historical Review'' 2014 89 (3): 359–399. * Klooster, Wim. ''The Dutch Moment: War, Trade, and Settlement in the Seventeenth-Century Atlantic World'' (2016) * Klooster, Wim, and Gert Oostindie. ''Realm between Empires: The Second Dutch Atlantic, 1680-1815'' (Cornell UP, 2018) 348 pp
pnline review
* Landsman, Ned C. ''Scotland and Its First American Colony, 1683–1765'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) * Landsman, Ned C. ''Crossroads of Empire: The Middle Colonies in British North America'' (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). * Games, Alison. "Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities." ''American Historical Review'' 2006 111(3): 741–757. * Games, Alison and Adam Rothman, eds. ''Major Problems in Atlantic History: Documents and Essays'' (2007), 544 pp.; primary and secondary sources * Gerbner, Katharine. "Theorizing Conversion: Christianity, Colonization, and Consciousness in the Early Modern Atlantic World." ''History Compass'' (2015) 13#3, pp. 134–147. * Godechot, Jacques.''Histoire de l'Atlantique''. Paris, Bordas, 1947. * Gould, Eliga H. and Peter S. Onuf, eds. ''Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World.'' Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 391 pages. excerpt and text search * Gould, Eliga H. "Entangled Atlantic Histories: A Response from the Anglo-American Periphery," ''The American Historical Review,'' 112:1415–1422, December 2007 * Greene, Jack P. and Philip D. Morgan, eds. ''Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal'' (2009) 371 pp., major historiographical review * Hancock, David. ''Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785'' (1995) * Land, Isaac. "Tidal Waves: the New Coastal History:" ''Journal of Social History'' 2007 40(3): 731–743. * Mancke, Elizabeth, and Carole Shammas, eds. ''The Creation of the British Atlantic World.'' (2005). 408 pages. . * Miller, Joseph C., ed.
The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History
' (2014) * Nagl, Dominik.
No Part of the Mother Country, but Distinct Dominions – Law, State Formation and Governance in England, Massachusetts und South Carolina, 1630–1769
' (2013). * Olwell, Robert, and Alan Tully, eds. ''Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America.'' (2006). 394 pages. * O'Reilly, William. "Genealogies of Atlantic History," ''Atlantic Studies'' 1 (2004): 66–84. * Polasky, Janet L. ''Revolutions without Borders'' (Yale UP, 2015). 392 pp
online review
* Rediker, Marcus. ''Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates, and the Anglo- American Maritime World, 1700–1750.'' (1987) * Smith, Joshua M. “Toward a Taxonomy of Maritime Historians,” ''International Journal of Maritime History'' XXV: 2 (December, 2013), 1–16. * Steele, Ian K. "Bernard Bailyn's American Atlantic." ''History and Theory'' 2007 46(1): 48–58. * Thornton, John. ''Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800'' (2nd ed., 1998) * Wilson, Kathleen, ed. ''A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire'' (2004). 385 pp. * Wilson, Kathleen, ''The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the. Eighteenth Century''. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.

External links

H-Atlantic
daily email discussions on related scholarly topics; includes book reviews and announcements
Oxford Bibliography Online: Atlantic History
annotated bibliography prepared by scholars
International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500–18252003 announcement of ''Atlantic Studies: Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical Perspectives'', from Essex University in UK
{{DEFAULTSORT:Atlantic History History of the Atlantic Ocean

History History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...

Historiography of the British Empire Historiography of the United States