What is the significance of the atlantic world

Specialists in colonial and modern Latin America, the Caribbean, colonial and early America, the nineteenth and twentieth-century United States, and early modern Britain incorporate an Atlantic world perspective in pursuit of diverse topics as wide-ranging as the environment, indigeneity, medicine, slavery and emancipation, the African diaspora, war, trade, scientific agriculture, migration, governance, religion, astrology, law, popular culture, and imperialism.

All work on the cutting edge of Atlantic studies. Our colonial Latin American historian examines the history of the colonial Andean world with a particular focus on encounters between indigenous people and African and European newcomers and their particular histories of adaptation and resistance. Historians of colonial and early America harness their thematic expertise the environment, indigeneity, slavery, and medicine to illuminate the imbrication of North American history within dynamic transatlantic networks connecting the Great Lakes and Paris or Jamaica, South Carolina, and London.

Because of the global scale of their subject matter, historians of U. To be sure, earlier historians of empire, exploration, and conquest had examined many of the issues that would later characterize Atlantic World scholarship, but they wrote in the absence of an overarching framework and instead focused mainly on the flow of people, ideas, and goods from Europe to the Americas with little to no consideration of how such flows affected indigenous and African societies and how they reverberated back across the Atlantic.

After the war, colonial historians pulled the Atlantic World model away from government policy makers and international diplomats and applied it to a series of important studies of the Chesapeake Bay region, Puritan New England, and Spanish Mexico.

The rise of the study of slavery in the s and s further augmented such earlier works and expanded the notion of what exactly a colonial society was. Later developments in African history afforded links between colonies and that continent such that the map of the Atlantic World expanded to include the Gold Coast, the Ivory Coast, the Congo, and the Bight of Benin. Dependence on trade goods, the ravages of epidemic diseases, indigenous efforts to counter both the growth of colonies and the devastation wrought by the trade in enslaved first peoples constitute major areas of investigation that have clearly shown the level of engagement first peoples had with Africans and Europeans through their membership in the Atlantic World.

Current scholarship on the Atlantic World tends to focus on the European and African components of the Atlantic World, and essay collections offer an accessible way to delve into the multiple research agendas and questions that characterize this rapidly growing field. Armitage and Braddick grew out of a series of papers delivered at the Harvard University International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, a seminar that emerged as an important incubator for scholarship in the field.

Greene and Morgan present essays that focus more on synthesizing the field than on the specific topics that characterize Armitage and Braddick Bailyn steps back from the specific concerns of historical research to ponder instead both the origins and the future of the field in an elegant and accessible set of essays that ground the field in reference to changes in American politics, historical practice, and notions of multiculturality.

Thornton establishes Africa as a constituent corner of the Atlantic World and challenges the European focus that had characterized much of the scholarship. Egerton, et al. Shannon is shorter and more thematic than Egerton, et al. In conjunction with Gilroy and Thornton , such books have established that people from America, Africa, and Europe together created the Atlantic world. Armitage, David, and Michael J.

Braddick, eds. The British Atlantic World, — New York: Palgrave Macmillan, Essays from that demonstrate the potential of the Atlantic approach to the study of history and that were intended to inform similar studies of the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Dutch empires, but that touch only tangentially on Native American topics.

The United States looked inward and westward at a vast internal empire, conquering much of the North American continent in the name of manifest destiny, and fighting a bitter and bloody Civil War over the shape that this empire of liberty would assume. The American Studies Association launched an International Initiative in , and recent ASA presidents have promoted the transnational turn in their presidential addresses.

Thus, even while they struggled to preserve imperial dominion in India and Asia, Britons in the lates embraced a political vision of the Northern Atlantic world that bound together the United States and the British Isles while much of Western Europe succumbed to fascism, an oceanic union that culminated in the Atlantic Charter of The histories of individual nations became less significant than the commercial, political, racial and other histories of an Atlantic world that was not confined within national borders.

Historians saw similar processes at work in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the English and then the British and their colonists defined themselves externally against the Spanish and the French, and internally against the Native Americans and the Africans they conquered and ruled. Encountering others around the Atlantic rim — from Ireland to the Chesapeake to Jamaica to West Africa — enabled the English and their colonists to develop a range of different yet intimately related English, British and North American identities.

Long before residents of the British Isles had begun traversing the Atlantic Ocean, the inhabitants of this provincial island group knew a great deal about the world beyond their shores. Elizabethan and Jacobean England was a society that knew about the expulsion of the Moors from Spain; traded with North Africa; invested in the Levant Company; and followed and even participated in the war between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire.

White had painted, for example, a heavily tattooed Pictish warrior triumphantly holding a severed human head; a colorfully dressed Uzbek man; a Greek woman holding a rose and a pomegranate; and veiled Turkish women and a Turkish man armed with a scimitar.

His evocative illustrations of the peoples, the flora and the fauna of the New World were often no more — and perhaps even less — exotic than those of people across oceans other than the Atlantic, and they bore witness to early modern English connections with all manner of peoples and cultures 5. At least initially neither Africans nor indigenous Americans imagined the Atlantic and its possibilities in quite the ways that Europeans could and did, and in a very real way it was thus the Europeans who created the Atlantic 6.

Rather, it is to recognizethe degree of agency and power exercised by Europeans as they navigated and used the Atlantic, first as explorers, then as settlers, traders, warriors and agents of nation and empire. The Europeans enjoyed economic and military supremacy, but given that society and culture are fashioned by victims as well as victors, less powerful Europeans, Africans and indigenous Americans played significant roles in shaping the new societies of the Euro-American Atlantic world.

Alden Vaughan has recently studied the twenty-five or so Powhatan Indians who travelled from early-seventeenth-century Virginia to England as either guests of the Virginia Company or as official envoys of the Powhatan Nation, and it is clear that their reports back to their own people had a revolutionary effect on Powhatan understanding of not just the European invaders but also of the Powhatan themselves and their place in the world, and of the Atlantic as the force that both separated and brought the English and the Powhatan together.

It was not simply standing on the shore watching European ships off the eastern shore of North America that changed the Powhatan, but rather travel across the Atlantic and direct engagement with other Atlantic societies 7. While trade, smuggling and warfare regularly drew Britons beyond their own particular Atlantic, the British North Atlantic became an ever more self-assured construction. John Elliott has suggested that we think in terms of three different early modern Atlantic worlds: a northern European Atlantic, a Spanish Atlantic, and a Luso-Atlantic linking Lisbon to Brazil.

It was, he suggests, only in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries that the African slave trade helped merge these Atlantics, and Elliott argues for a larger and more comparative Atlantic framework 8. A Braudelian perspective on the Atlantic would support Elliott, yet with the exceptionof some work on the slave trade, few historians of Northern Europe and North America have comprehended a sub-equatorial Atlantic as part of the world they study. At least one-third and possibly nearly one-half of the Africans who crossed the Atlantic in chains were bound for South America.

Exploration, trade, and fishing expeditions had long tempted sailors and adventurers into Atlantic waters. However, in the 15th century the search for gold, spices, and the lucrative markets of the East led Europeans to extend their travels southward down the African coast and westward into the ocean. Over the course of the next several centuries, the massive migrations see the Oxford Bibliographies article on Migrations and Diasporas —both forced and free—of people as well as the transfer of plants, animals, and microbes irrevocably linked North America, South America, Africa, and Europe.

The complexity, diversity, and evolving nature of the Atlantic world that developed from these encounters defies concise and simple characterization. This article confines itself to an overview of the ambitions and experiences of major European powers who competed for access to the human, material, and territorial wealth of the newly connected continents.

Thus it provides a bibliographic introduction to the Iberian, French, British, and Dutch Atlantic worlds. These European Atlantic worlds were diverse and changing spheres of activity, influenced by numerous factors within Europe and forged through intimate, extensive, and shifting patterns of contact with native inhabitants of the Americas and Africa.

The reading suggestions provided here do not represent a comprehensive guide to the creation of this multifaceted Atlantic world. Scholars who are interested in pursuing questions related to specific spheres of Atlantic engagement European, African, and American or the multiple phenomena that crisscrossed them can find other relevant sources including primary source guides that offer a more detailed perspective on distinct but overlapping component parts of the complex Atlantic world.

Games, et al. Davis is a comprehensive survey of slavery and its role in shaping New World societies, while Pagden compares the ideological origins of Spanish, British, and French imperial policies.

Klooster provides a comparative study of Atlantic revolutions. Canny and Pagden and Altman and Horn discuss aspects of European immigration and identity formation throughout the Atlantic.

Elliott offers an extensive comparison of British and Spanish American endeavors. Altman, Ida, and James Horn. Berkeley: University of California Press,