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Atlantic World or Atlantic/World?
Peter A. Coclanis
| DURING the past decade or two, Atlantic history has insinuated itself into the very depths of the historical discipline. In so doing the approach has transformed early American history—for better or worse or, more accurately, for better and worse. What is it about Atlantic history that has made it so appealing? For one thing the relative capaciousness of the approach represents a significant improvement, ceteris paribus, over narrower national or protonational alternatives. Second the approach has proved attractive and enticing to some absolutely first-rate historians, which has had what economists would call a powerful signaling effect on others in the profession. And cultural capital helps too. Through a variety of powerful institutional mechanisms—Johns Hopkins University's program in Atlantic History, Culture, and Society and Harvard University's International Seminar in the History of the Atlantic World, 1500–1825, to name two of the most obvious and important—scores of bright young scholars over the years have been exposed to, dazzled by, and initiated into Atlantic history.1 |
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What are these people talking about when they invoke Atlantic history and wax on about the Atlantic world(s)? Though there are many Atlantics, as it were, most scholars would probably agree with Bernard Bailyn's simple and direct proposition that during the "early modern" period (circa 1500–1800 CE) Western Europe, West Africa, and the Americas were sufficiently integrated in many ways to lend themselves to treatment as a single unit: the Atlantic world.2 To be sure such scholars might quibble over what material and/or ideational concerns to include in such treatment, over just how unitary said treatment needs to be, over the power dynamics within and historical consequences of the unit in question, and over the degree to which this unit was hermetic or subject to breach. But by and large historians of the Atlantic community could live with this conceptual scheme. In truth, under its broad shelter, they have lived very well indeed. |
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So what is my problem with Atlantic history? Why the "for better and worse" earlier? Simply put, the levels of explanatory power and analytic acuity possible via the Atlantic history stratagem are beguiling but ultimately confining because the stratagem artificially limits the field of vision of its devotees, often blinding them to processes, developments, and conditions of central importance to understanding their figurative little corner of the world. Or to put it another way, Bobby Darin's way, we need to move "beyond the sea." Certainly that sea, but maybe others as well.
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| Seas and oceans are very much in these days. We have Atlantic historians and historians of the Indian Ocean world. We have long known about Braudel, but there are new generations of scholars touting la méditérannée as an organizing conceit. The Black Sea has its people, as do the Great Lakes (both those in East Africa and those in my native region, the U.S. Midwest). Some scholars are studying the world of the North Sea, and there are Pacific basinites and rimmers galore. Others, their metageographies reshaped or at least modified by Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen's influential work, are even beginning to chant the mantra "oceans connect, oceans connect."3 The problem with this and other repetitive sacred formulae, including Atlantic history, is that such repetition has what economists call opportunity costs, the costs incurred by not pursuing the best available alternative. |
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