Reviewed by Wayne Bodl | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.1

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Reviewed by Wayne Bodl | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Atlantic History Is the New "New Social History"

Wayne Bodl, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

The Creation of the British Atlantic World. Edited by Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 408 pages. $52.00 (cloth).

Cultures and Identities in Colonial British America. Edited by Robert Olwell and Alan Tully. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 394 pages. $50.00 (cloth).

Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World. Edited by Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. 391 pages. $49.95 (cloth).

Skipping over the trickle phase entirely, Atlantic history began with a steady stream. Within about a decade, it grew to a veritable torrent of inquiry and analysis as well as narrative and methodological innovation, probing the familiar and the new. It has prompted conferences, special issues, associations, institution-based standing seminars, and other apparatus indicative of the generationally defined dominant subdiscipline. Like social history, as it moved from being literally new to being maturely and only rhetorically so, it tempts practitioners to claim or opt into it on perhaps ambiguous grounds. It begins to have its schools, still largely undenominated, and inevitably its skeptics. Anything that promises to explain something about everything may risk seeming to explain very little about anything. One day graduate students will surely roll their eyes and pronounce it "soooo turn of the millennium." By then, however, its enduring insights and the knowledge embedded in them will be safely stored in well-worn, if perhaps increasingly little- consulted, volumes such as the ones under review.

These books appear in Johns Hopkins University Press's Anglo-America in the Trans-Atlantic World series under the general editorship of Jack P. Greene. They do not formally purport to be a Festschrift proceeding, yet they are filled with essays by generations (from the 1960s to the early 2000s) of Greene's students and some of his close associates. Most were presented at a conference, perhaps organized to ward off a tribute, hosted by Greene himself at Johns Hopkins University in 1999. The prodigious diversity of Greene's scholarship and the resulting breadth of his life's work in teaching graduate students do not lend themselves neatly or narrowly to the category of Atlantic history. Even those considerable parts of his oeuvre that span hemispheres have tended to be more regardful of structural, institutional, constitutional, and indeed imperial considerations than many members of the modern community of Atlantic practitioners might claim for themselves. All this may merely testify to Greene's genial tolerance for and evident comfort with students and colleagues whose work may take off from certain aspects of his own studies but range widely beyond such points. These three volumes do not invite continuous, much less recreational, reading. Collectively, they contain forty essays, exclusive of introductions; readers who try to impose order on their personal libraries will probably shelve them with the proliferating sets of encyclopedias, companions, and anthologies that digest the expanding scholarship on the early American universe into thematic, or at least coherent, domains of knowledge.

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