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Reviews of Books
Brave New Worlds: Beyond the English Atlantic
Simon P. Newman, University of Glasgow
| Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World. Edited by Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 385 pages. $59.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Edited by David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick. New York: Palgrave, 2002. 344 pages. $95.00 (cloth), $35.00 (paper).
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If one did not know that he was referring to the world of early modern scholarship, David Armitage's assertion that "we are all Atlanticists now" (11) might have seemed obvious rather than fresh. A peculiarly Anglo-American construction of the Atlantic retained currency until late into the twentieth century. Though they struggled to preserve imperial dominion in India and Asia, Britons in the late 1930s embraced a political vision of the northern Atlantic world that bound together the United States and the British Isles while most of western Europe succumbed to fascism, culminating in the Atlantic Charter of 1941. Similarly, the single most important alliance to emerge from the ashes of that conflict as a new global Cold War began was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and, once again, people who were very aware of their connections across and around the planet nonetheless found some measure of security and stability in conceiving of their position vis-à-vis an Atlantic world. |
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Contemporary analogies to the contrary, and despite a plethora of new courses and degree programs, centers, doctoral dissertations, articles, and books that appear to support Armitage's claim, an Atlanticist approach to the early modern history of western Europe, western Africa, and the Americas is far from ubiquitous: though some scholars continue to teach and research primarily in terms of explicitly nationalist or regional paradigms and neglect the larger perspective and comparative approaches of Atlanticists, others object that the early modern world could not be contained in either practical or conceptual terms by the Atlantic rim. Both of these volumes make effective arguments against such naysayers, illustrating the ways in which seventeenth-century Englishmen and -women and eighteenth-century Britons physically and mentally constructed an Atlantic world. |
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The twentieth-century Anglo-American Atlantic world gained much of its meaning and significance in opposition to a readily definable other, whether a fascist or a communist threat, and the shared characteristics and identities celebrated by Anglo-Americans emerged from this crucible of conflict. As the essays in both these books illustrate, similar processes were 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 Native Americans and then Africans. Encountering others around the Atlantic rim—from Ireland to the Chesapeake to Barbados to West Africa—enabled the English and their colonists to develop different yet intimately related English, British, and North American identities. |
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Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet's volume, subtitled Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World, comprises an engaging study of the remarkably varied ways in which the Atlantic identity of one fragile community coalesced in ideas and experiences forged in England and in societies around and even beyond the northern Atlantic rim. As many of the essayists remind readers, 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. All of these experiences of a larger world informed English colonization of Virginia, the manner in which that colonization proceeded, and the ways that colonists and Englishmen and -women began to think of an Atlantic world that united mother country and colony as much as it separated them. |
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