Atlantic History: Concept and Contours | 
| Author: Bernard Bailyn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Category: Book
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Sales Rank: 51525
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 160
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 0674016882
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.098210072
EAN: 9780674016880
ASIN: 0674016882
Publication Date: March 31, 2005
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Product Description
Atlantic history is a newly and rapidly developing field of historical study. Bringing together elements of early modern European, African, and American history--their common, comparative, and interactive aspects--Atlantic history embraces essentials of Western civilization, from the first contacts of Europe with the Western Hemisphere to the independence movements and the globalizing industrial revolution. In these probing essays, Bernard Bailyn explores the origins of the subject, its rapid development, and its impact on historical study. He first considers Atlantic history as a subject of historical inquiry--how it evolved as a product of both the pressures of post-World War II politics and the internal forces of scholarship itself. He then outlines major themes in the subject over the three centuries following the European discoveries. The vast contribution of the African people to all regions of the West, the westward migration of Europeans, pan-Atlantic commerce and its role in developing economies, racial and ethnic relations, the spread of Enlightenment ideas--all are Atlantic phenomena. In examining both the historiographical and historical dimensions of this developing subject, Bailyn illuminates the dynamics of history as a discipline. (20050401)
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Mapping Atlantic History October 17, 2005
40 out of 43 found this review helpful
After reading Bailyn's "ATLANTIC HISTORY: Concept and Contours" many of the more recent histories of North America I've read suddenly make a lot more sense, histories such as Alan Taylor's AMERICAN COLONIES, and WILLIAM COOPER' S TOWN, Linebaugh and Rediker's radical THE MANY-HEADED HYDRA, as well as Victoria Freeman's DISTANT RELATIONS to name just a few.
Bailyn provides admirable summary of the how the "concept" of Atlantic history was launched -- by Walter Lippman in an essay justifying America's involvement in the Great War -- and then taken up by politicians in the wake of WWII as justification for the such organizations as NATO whose mission was to bind together more tightly the interests of the states of Western "Christendom" against those of the Communistic (and godless) East. Some historians supported this new notion with tendentious misreadings of history, but others of a more empirical bent began to undertake histories that looked beyond the old narratives of individual nation states and focused instead the commonalities of conquest and colonization in the Americas and Africa as practiced by Westerners.
Bailyn dicusses the "contours" of Atlantic history by outlining the discipline's key findings, elucidating its key ideas, citing its indispensible texts, and historic techniques such as statistical investigations, e.g., the construction of a slave trade database compiled from actual records which demonstrate how the slave system served to underwrite the entire system of trade in the "inland sea" of the Atlantic. For the amateur historian, and perhaps even for the professional, Bailyn's "Notes" section is exceedingly useful as it offers a rich survey of the most important texts that have emerged in this rich and rapidly expanding field of study.
Here are a couple of exemplary passages from the book. "In its first, original phase Atlantic history in the broadest sense is the story of the creation of a vast new marchland of European civilization, an ill-defined, irregular outer borderland, thrust into the world of indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere and in the outer reaches of the British archipelago. Life in this contested marchland was, literally, barbarous: that is in its initial stages it was, in large areas, a scene of conflict with alien people, alien in language and mores, hostile in purpose, savage and uncultivated. Europeans, native Americans and displaced Africans, all -- each from their own point of view -- saw it that way. For all, others were intent on destroying the civility -- European, native American, African -- that had once existed. Latin America, to paraphrase John Elliott, was no wilderness; the conquest made it that." Page 63.
Bailyn's notes the barbarity of the conquerors did not vary by religious conviction or national origin. "Puritan New England was not different from Mexico or Peru. '"It was a fearful sight,"' the pious gentle Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote of New England's Pequot War (1637), "'to see [the Indians] frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof.'" Page 65. Indeed the Dutch and English conquerors read accounts of the Spanish conquistadors and were more than familiar with their techniques. The Dutch, having been subjects of Spain, may have been less frequently cruel in their dealings with native peoples than others, but were capable of exceeding cruelty. For instance, Dutch soldiers in a raid near New Amsterdam cut some of the native children in pieces "before the eyes of their parents, and threw the pieces thrown into the fire or into the water." Pg. 63. Clearly, the Spanish were not the only conquistadors.
I don't mean to give the impression that Bailyn speaks only of the barbarous first or conquest phase, he also does a admirable summary of the colonial phase. Once the domination of indigenous people's was relatively complete, the colonists and those who stayed at home in Europe profited mightily from the slave trade: the labor system that wove together, for instance, the economic lives of New England farmers who sold their agricultural products to the slave masters in the Caribbean, so that they could buy fine lace and fine wine and other items from Europe and so keep maintain the appearance of civility. Labor for the sugar, rice, tobacco and cotton plantations came primarily from West Africa, but was also supplied by the exportation of the many dispossessed, conquered and persecuted people in England, Ireland, Germany, France and elsewhere in Europe. Athouigh Bailyn doesn't say it explicity, the economic imperatives of globalization have been around for a long, long time.
I don't mean to suggest that Bailyn concentrates only on the most barbarous elements of Atlantic history. He offers insight into how certain cultural aspects drove and supported this vast, complex process. Quakers are, for instance, a paramount example of a tightly knit but far-flung commmunity who profited mightily in the chaotic marketplace of that time both because of the bonds of trust forged in their communal worship, and also and because there were Quakers at every entrepot in the system, relaying intelligence on the fluctuating prices of slaves, sugar, rum, tobacco, whale oil, etc. As Bailyn notes, black markets, corruption, bribery existed side by side with "official trade" and so it best served those who could outwit the authorities, or those authorities who could actually enforce their authority. Ideas flowed as well, ideas of liberation, revolt and democracy. Bolivar, son of a wealthy planter, educated in Europe, knew of Montesqieu, Madison, Jefferson and Rousseau -- not unusual for a member of the Atlantic elite.
A marvelous work of tremendous reach and scholarly erudition packed into just a weekend's reading, "Atlantic History" takes stock of this new current of historical research and points presciently toward the new directions it may take.
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