| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Thomas Summerhill and James C. Scott, editors. Transatlantic Rebels: Agrarian Radicalism in Comparative Context. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 300. $29.95.
This volume offers a motley collection of strong essays in pursuit of a pivotally important historical challenge. The assembled studies examine diverse aspects of agrarian societies around the Atlantic world—Europe and the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Americas—from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Most focus on the era from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries. The integrating premise is that the histories of peoples in the diverse societies of the Atlantic basin demand analyses that emphasize transatlantic interactions. The goal is to extend the Atlantic vision that has flourished in recent studies of the early modern era of European colonialism and the slave trade to illuminate our understanding of more modern nation making, migrations, industrialization, agricultural transformations, and the ideological and cultural visions swirling around them—here emphasizing agriculture and rural communities. The collection demonstrates both the importance of the goal and the difficulty of achieving it.	1
The studies take three different perspectives. Some focus on transatlantic transfers of cultigens, mostly moving west to east. Others emphasize agricultural reform and improvement, early moving east to west, and later southeast to Africa. And many focus on the assertions of rural peoples in the politics of nation making, mostly across the Americas from Canada to Colombia. The first achievement of the book, then, is to press scholars and readers to think across borders. One fundamental difficulty is the title. Perhaps maize introduced into Europe and Africa, technical reformers pressing new ways of cultivating across the Americas, ideologues demanding land reform across the Atlantic, and insurgents challenging power holders everywhere all qualify as agrarian radicals. Only the last operated as rebels.	. . .

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