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British Asia and British Atlantic: Comparisons and Connections
Philip J. Stern
| THE concept of the British Atlantic world has done a great deal to free historians of early modern Britain, the British Empire, and early America from the anachronistic shackles of the "nation" and the "state." Exposing the cultural, intellectual, political, economic, and social histories heretofore obscured by a preoccupation with territorial contiguity, the study of Atlantic history has helped to disarm deceptive categories of analysis, from the proleptic ("colonial United States") to the synecdochic ("England"), while adding breadth, depth, and texture to a vision of how early modern states and empires were created. Yet as this field has matured from a methodology into a subdiscipline of early modern British and early American history, thinking Atlantically has been transformed from a provocative apostasy into a sort of historiographical shibboleth. As even some of the most prominent practitioners of Atlantic world history have warned, the Atlantic's own borders soon may become as rigid and unyielding as those of the national histories with which these historians have so ably dispensed.1 |
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One principal problem has been that the scope of Atlantic history (and the business of Atlantic historians) has often been defined exclusively by the geographic limits of the Atlantic Ocean. Though it has certainly opened up numerous new areas of historical inquiry, the concept of a British Atlantic "World," when bounded by the Straits of Magellan and the Cape of Good Hope, may also be doing much to discourage historiographical communication among early modern British historians. Such a division between historians of Britain's East and West has only been encouraged by an otherwise stimulating interest in exploring all the "oceans of history." Like their Atlantic counterparts, scholars of the Indian and Pacific oceans have been, somewhat understandably, more inclined to see how "oceans connect" their own respective basins rather than how these oceans are linked to one another.2 |
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For all the good oceanic histories have done, they seem to have encouraged and reinforced a geographic and chronological rupture in the study of the early modern British Empire. The British Atlantic continues to be viewed as a site of colonial plantation and settlement, of active interest to European states and only reluctantly and partially abandoned in the late eighteenth century. It was primarily a site of European empire. Conversely, as the exclusive jurisdiction of the English East India Company, early modern British Asia has been perceived as a place for profit, not politics. Historians have been all too comfortable with a vision of a British South Asian empire acquired, in Thomas Babington Macaulay's words, by "mere traders, ignorant of general politics, ignorant of the peculiarities of empire which had strangely become subject to them." Emphasizing the distinctions rather than similarities between the Atlantic and Asia has not just unduly colored historical accounts of early modern Britons' overseas experiences. Such a perspective has also endorsed divergent but perhaps misleading narratives of the development of the British Atlantic and British Asia: the former, a network of colonies deliberately acquired but lost to salutary neglect; the latter, in J. R. Seeley's famous pronouncement, an empire accidentally and haphazardly acquired by a trading company "in a fit of absence of mind."3 |
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