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Forum
Beyond the Atlantic: English Globetrotters and Transoceanic Connections
Alison Games
| WHAT makes a geographic region a logical unit of historical analysis? Historians are products of disciplinary conventions that classify jobs and professional organizations first by place (generally a nation, a region as defined by the old model of area studies, or a continental landmass) and then by historical period. These conventions are obviously determined by where scholars work and study: that the United States is one field whereas all of Asia is another reflects peculiarities of our profession in the United States.1 Historians perpetuate these distinctions that privilege geographic region in departmental field structures, in courses and majors for undergraduates, and in graduate programs for doctoral candidates. The profession replicates itself within this preexisting geographic framework, largely because advisers want to be sure that students can find jobs as most departments continue to define them: by region. For most historians, then, place is often the starting point in historical research. But the geographic space that guides research can impose unnatural constraints. For historians of the early modern period, the modern political boundaries that determine regions of study (as departments define such entities) can be confining because early borders—where they existed or were acknowledged—were porous, contested, and shifting. Moreover, research topics related to the expansion of Europe and global interaction in the early modern period, precisely the types of studies likely to engage scholars of colonial societies, do not lend themselves well to single regions. Historians consequently find themselves struggling to write nonnational histories within national paradigms. |
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One useful solution to these dilemmas can be seen in the growing field of Atlantic history, which takes as its unit of analysis not a single state but rather the four continents surrounding the Atlantic as well as the ocean itself.2 The turn toward the Atlantic by many early Americanists has been a boon. This broad regional perspective helps historians of colonial societies escape the nationalist teleologies that plague colonial history. It has similarly posed new questions and suggested new methodologies as historians of early America find convergences with other fields and perspectives. In short, the emergence of Atlantic history has played an important role in the invigoration of the field. |
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But might the Atlantic be too small a unit of analysis? To what extent should historians engage questions about developments within the Atlantic by looking elsewhere around the globe, thereby integrating the Atlantic into a larger global history? Similarly, to what extent are the processes that occurred within the Atlantic global, not regional, in nature, thus requiring a global approach? This Forum investigates, from a range of geographic and methodological perspectives, the constraints of the bounded Atlantic in the context of early modern British and early American history. It suggests that adherence to arbitrary boundaries has the unfortunate consequence of severing regions and historiographies that might be fruitfully drawn into dialogue. |
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