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Atlantic History from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives
Paul W. Mapp
| ATLANTIC history has proven a fruitfully effective model and a frustratingly elusive notion. Though its utility has been evident in the many insightful works it has inspired, its ultimate validity as a general conceptual or methodological model remains a matter of dispute. Scholars are writing impressive books about Atlantic history even as questions about the paradigm's essential soundness continue to produce much scratching of heads and furrowing of brows. |
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One way to assess the Atlantic model is to return to the kinds of considerations that made it initially appealing. Part of what led scholars to an interest in Atlantic history in the first place was the observation that individual research projects fit more comfortably in an Atlantic framework than in the local, national, or imperial categories many historians had been using. The same question can be asked about the relation between the Atlantic paradigm and the projects it has stimulated: do the kinds of investigations needed to explain the transformations of the Atlantic world fall easily within the conceptual structure of Atlantic history? |
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One impetus for these Atlantic world transformations was the eighteenth-century Atlantic empires' contest for dominion over North America, a struggle that therefore constitutes a natural subject for Atlantic history. Though the North American Far West has long seemed too remote and obscure a region to figure much in these imperial struggles, Europe's speculative geographies of the area played a surprisingly large role in the eighteenth-century "competition for empire."1 The relation among North American region, imperial rivalries, and geographic perceptions influenced the history of the Atlantic world; Atlantic history, however, offers too confining a conceptual or methodological model to help scholars fully understand why. |
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Consideration of the Far West's role in imperial affairs begins properly with geographic uncertainty. For most of the eighteenth century, much of the North American continent remained largely occupied by Amerindians and was little known to Europeans. For officials in Europe's imperial capitals, the mountain West north of New Mexico and Sonora, the Pacific Coast north of lower California, large parts of the western Plains, and nearly all the lands west of Hudson Bay composed a murky domain of hearsay and conjecture rather than the solid terrain of fact and conclusion. The geographers and explorers to whom Enlightenment-era officials turned for counsel were still contemplating the possibilities that a Northwest Passage might extend from Hudson Bay to the Pacific; that a great navigable river might run from a gentle height of land in the continental interior to an inland extension of the Pacific; that silver lodes recalling Potosí might lie beneath western mountains; and that Asian trading outposts or wealthy indigenous civilizations might rest undiscovered on the Northwest Coast (Figure I). |
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