Atlantic Studies

A LONG ATLANTIC IN A WIDER WORLD
Donna Gabaccia
In the 1990s, the geographical conceit of the Atlantic as a watery site of cross-cultural exchange
and struggles gained wide enough currency to alter teaching and research on Africa, Europe,
and the Americas, at least for the years between 1500 and 1800. This paper examines the
possibilities for analyzing a longer history of the Atlantic—one that conceivably reaches into
our own times. Key to creating a periodization for this longer Atlantic is the changing place of
the Atlantic in the wider world. Interpretations of the Atlantic as a separate or central “world” in
the years before 1800 are collapsing in the face of global perspectives. The paper summarizes a
considerable literature on the Atlantic economy of the nineteenth century that complements in
surprising ways the work on red, black and white Atlantic in earlier centuries. This literature also
reveals little-known and multi-disciplinary roots of the emerging field of Atlantic Studies.
Although the usefulness of Atlantic analyses become more problematic for historians of the
“American century,” analyses of red, black and white Atlantic continue to have some salience
for the era of NATO and American global hegemony.
KEYWORDS global history; historiography; Atlantic world; periodization; Cold

War; modern Atlantic; white Atlantic; red Atlantic; black Atlantic
In the 1990s, the geographical conceit of the Atlantic as a watery site of cross-cultural
exchange and struggles gained wide enough currency to begin to alter teaching and
research on Africa, Europe, and the Americas, at least for the years between 1500 and
1800. Of course, the last decade of the twentieth century was not the first time scholars
looked to the Atlantic for research frames extending beyond a single nation or continent.
However, contemporary understandings of the Atlantic do differ from earlier ones in their
temporal scope, periodization, geography, and disciplinary foundations, reflecting contem-
porary scholarly desires for more global modes of analysis.
The Atlantic of contemporary scholarship encompasses a longer history than does
its predecessors; it is also larger in its geographical, linguistic, and disciplinary purview.
Broadening the Atlantic reflects a fruitful but also troubled and unresolved relationship
between Atlantic and global studies over the last two decades. Particularly in the 1990s,
global and international studies, world history, and globalization theory flourished. In
addition, a general and worldwide perception of increasing globalization accompanied
both celebrations and laments about the triumph of capitalism after the collapse of the
Soviet Union. These popular debates should not all be dismissed as mere “global
babble” or “globaloney.”1 On the contrary, a widespread fascination with globality2 —
1
Abu-Lughod, “Going Beyond Global Babble.”
2
Robertson, “Globality, Globalization and Transdisciplinarity,” 127– 132.
Atlantic Studies, Vol. 1, No 1, 2004

ISSN 1478-8810 print/1470-4649 online/04/010001-27
# 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1478881042000217188
2 DONNA GABACCIA
the awareness of the “world as a whole”—helped to problematize academic area studies

more generally. While area studies had offered scholars an interdisciplinary escape from
the “tyranny of the national,”3 they had remained “parochial globalisms” (to borrow
Patrick Manning’s phrase) and were largely products of Cold War geopolitics.4
However, to some degree, at least, so was Atlantic history. Like earlier parochial
globalisms, studies of the Atlantic could never completely satisfy those calling for more
global methodologies. The significance of Atlantic developments for the wider world and
the place of the Atlantic in that world remains an unresolved issue for today’s Atlanticists.
I do not offer an easy resolution in this paper. Instead, my goal is to provide Atlanticists
with a brief overview of the intellectual origins and evolution of their field and to
suggest a periodization for Atlantic studies based on that overview. My hope is that
readers and contributors to Atlantic Studies then think to situate their own research not
only within the long sweep of Atlantic history but within the wider and more
global spatial frames that are most appropriate for Atlantic studies in the twenty-first
century.
Many Atlantics: a Brief Historiography

Authors of recent review articles have all noted the varied genealogies of Atlantic
studies but they have located them almost exclusively within the discipline of history.
Bernard Bailyn attributed the origins of one important stream of Anglo-American Atlantic
history to World-War-One and its Wilsonian and internationalist critiques of Progressives’
histories of the US.5 Still, even Bailyn’s narrative confirms what other surveys of geogra-
phically wider Atlantics also suggest. The twenty-year period surrounding World War II
generated the greatest intellectual excitement about Atlantic studies prior to our own
times.6 The years between 1930 and 1950 lay the foundations for the three major streams
of Atlantic studies that scholars—in an odd blending of racial and political terminology—
have labeled the “white,” (European or Anglo-American empire building and cultural
expansion “from above”), “black” (African and diasporic “from below”) and “red” (rebellious,
egalitarian and proletarian, “from below”) Atlantics.7 In quite different ways, the study of
all these Atlantics reflected the complex intellectual geo-politics of the decades bracketing
World War II.
Even then, however, there were transnational alternatives to Atlantic studies, and
these paths not taken are worth querying. In the early 1930s, Latin Americanist Herbert
Bolton called on his colleagues to write a hemispheric history of “a larger America”;8
3
Noiriel, La tyrannie du national.
4
Manning, Navigating World History, 170–173.
5
Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” 19–44.
6
Canny “Writing Atlantic History,” 1093 –1114; Coclanis, “Drang nach Osten,” 169–182; Cañizares-Esguerra,
“Some caveats about the ‘Atlantic’ paradigm.”
7
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. See Rediker, “The Red Atlantic”; Armitage, “The Red Atlantic,” 479–586. Whelan
now argues also for “The Green Atlantic.” For an alternative schema of “Transatlantic,” “circumAtlantic”
and “cisAtlantic,” see David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” 11– 30.
8
Bolton, “Epic of Greater America,” 448–474; History of the Americas. For the geo-political hemispheric
context that ultimately opened space instead for Atlantic studies, see Whitaker, The Western Hemisphere Idea.
A LONG ATLANTIC IN A WIDER WORLD 3
almost contemporaneously the Carnegie Endowment initiated a major research project on

continental North America.9 Apparently, the deepening of the worldwide depression, fol-
lowed first by the formation of an anti-fascist Atlantic Alliance and global war and then
by de-colonization in the context of a Cold War between the Communist USSR and the capi-
talist democracies lead by the US that ultimately allowed Atlantic perspectives to flourish.
And flourish they did. In 1938 Caribbeanist Eric Williams’s dissertation10 raised
questions about the relationships of the slave trade, slavery and the Atlantic origins of
capitalism; that relationship is still a matter of debate among specialists on the “black”
and “red” Atlantics. In the same year, C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins, with its study of black
revolution in San Domingo, appeared.11 Study of the “white” Atlantic coalesced at
roughly the same time. By 1943 liberal journalist Walter Lippman had revived earlier
critiques of American isolationism and pronounced the Atlantic to be “the inland sea of
a community of nations” which was largely coterminous with the west or with western
civilization (a geography that, like the Atlantic alliance, largely excluded Latin America).12
By 1945 maritime historian and Canadian John Bartlet Brebner had moved even the
Carnegie Endowment’s project on North America into an analysis of a North Atlantic
Triangle of Britain, Canada, and the US.13 In 1946, a comparison of slavery and emancipation
in North and Latin America, written by Latin Americanist, economist and labor activist
Frank Tannenbaum, revived Bolton’s hemispheric history but placed it, too, in Atlantic
perspective.14 By 1949, when Fernand Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean opened new
methodological vistas, the basic outlines of “white,” “red” and “black” Atlantics were well
established.15
Cold war16 and Braudelian17 influences on studies of the Atlantic remained paramount
from the 1950s through the 1960s, but by the 1970s, small steps—especially in the direction
of world history and interdisciplinary studies—hinted at the changes that would become
more evident in the 1980s and 1990s. In American studies, Marcus Cunliffe persistently
compared European and American views of each other’s literatures, societies, and national
characters from an interdisciplinary perspective.18 Already in 1954, colonialist Frank Thistle-
thwaite had called on students of American immigration to “part the salt water curtain” by
attending to migration as an Atlantic phenomenon.19 The translation into English of C.L.R.
James’s work on the black revolutionaries, along with new work on the Atlantic slave
9
Shotwell directed the project for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; it published a series of
monographs on Canada-US relations. See Berger, “Internationalism, Continentalism, and the Writing of
History,” 32– 54. For the intellectual foundations of the project, see the early statement by Brebner,
“Canadian and North American History,” 37 –48.
10
Published as Wiliams, Capitalism & Slavery.
11
James, The Black Jacobins.
12
Quoted in Ikenberry, “Why Export Democracy?”
13
Brebner, North Atlantic Triangle.
14
Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen.
15
Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde Méditerranéen à la époque de Philippe II.
16
Surveying the work of historians, Canny, for example, points to Godechot, Kraus and Palmer as three
historians whose work seemed particularly devoted to “creating the intellectual pedigree” for NATO.
17
For example, Huguette and Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, 1504–1650.
18
See the essays, collected shortly after his death, in In Search of America.
19
Thistlethwaite, “Migration from Europe Overseas,” 34
4 DONNA GABACCIA
trade by Walter Rodney20 and Phil Curtin21 and by Rodney on the colonial relationship
between Europe and Africa22 kept alive controversies over the origins of capitalism and of
racism in the Atlantic, a topic taken up again in sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein’s The
Modern World System. 23 The institutionalization of Atlantic studies at Johns Hopkins in the
early 1970s drew equally heavily on the work of comparative world historians (such as
Phillip Curtin), comparative studies of slavery by Tannenbaum and of colonialism (such as
those by J.H. Elliott)24 and the work of anthropologist and Caribbeanist Sidney Mintz.25
In the 1980s and even more obviously in the 1990s publications studying the Atlantic
increased in number and Atlantic history found greater institutionalization alongside world
history and global studies as a research and teaching field in university programs. Why was
this so? Defining the Atlantic as a distinctive area was an innovative way to re-frame the
moment of first connection between the Americas and an already integrated “old world”
that world historians now called the “ecumene” or “world island” of Afro-Eurasia.26 It pro-
vided a conceptually challenging alternative to politically charged metaphors such as
discovery and conquest. It offered scholars a “maritime response”27 to a crisis in area
studies that followed the collapse of the USSR and the rise of theories of post-modernity
and globalization.28 What it did not do is challenge the assumptions of European excep-
tionalism and expansion. Instead, the Atlantic mutated as study of it expanded.29 Rather
different understandings of the geography and temporality of the Atlantic and of interdis-
ciplinary methods for the study of “white,” “black” and “red” Atlantics were the result. All
developed parallel to but not always in active debate with studies of the wider world.
In the “white” Atlantic, colonial histories of the years between 1500 and 1800 have
dominated, complemented by studies of mobile culture and intellectual exchange.30
While the “white” Atlantic encompasses transnational and comparative studies of the
five largest Atlantic colonizers (England, France, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands), ana-
lyses of the North Atlantic and Latin Atlantic colonies continue to differ methodologically.
Jorgé Cañizares Esguerra is certainly correct in noting that no pan-American Atlantic has
yet been analyzed and that much study of the early Atlantic continues to privilege the
British, English-speaking North Atlantic.31 The legacy of NATO for the “white” Atlantic
persisted in other ways too: a growing and interdisciplinary literature (which I survey in
detail below) now also examines trans-Atlantic exchanges among the intellectuals of the
industrial nations of the North Atlantic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
20
Rodney, West Africa and the Atlantic Slave-trade.
21
Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: a Census.
22
Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
23
Wallerstein, The Modern World System.
24
Elliott, The Old World and the New.
25
Greene, “Beyond Power,” 17–42.
26
Followers of William McNeill generally prefer “ecumene;” the older term, “world island” was introduced by
Mackinder, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” 424–437.
27
Lewis and Wigen, “A Maritime Response to the Crisis in Area Studies,” 161–168.
28
Waters, Beyond the Area Studies Wars; see also Manning, Navigating World History, Chap. 8.
29
Eltis, “Atlantic History in Global Perspective.”
30
For example, Roach, Cities of the Dead. For intellectual influences in the British Atlantic, the early work of
Bailyn remains seminal: The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.
31
Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World.
Largely absent from the “white” Atlantic except as a source of slaves, Africa under-
standably looms large in studies of the “black” Atlantic. Its presence helped to create a
longer and more interdisciplinary Atlantic, and a redder one. The geography of the
“black” Atlantic altered as the westward bound slave trade from western and sub-Saharan
Africa to the Caribbean and to the tropical and semi-tropical coasts of the Americas
diminished, and as Europeans built new empires in Africa and Asia in the nineteenth
century, attaching northern, central, and southern Africa more firmly to northern metro-
poles. The long-term campaign against slavery and the emancipation of slaves in the
Americas32—stretching as they did over a century—also give the “black” Atlantic (some-
times also now formulated as a black diaspora33) a history that continues well after 1800.
This longer history does not culminate in the NATO alliance but rather in the anti-racist
and anti-imperialist movements of the second postwar era. Interest in the “black” Atlantic
has also generated the most interdisciplinary work, from the anthropology of Mintz to the
seminal writings of Paul Gilroy.34
Although David Armitage has sought the genealogy of recent studies of the “red”
Atlantic in the writings of Marx (with his notion of global working-class solidarity),35 recent pub-
lications by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker probably owe as much to the founders and
innovators of the “black” Atlantic historiography (from Dubois, Hilton, Rodney, James and Wil-
liams to Gilroy). And while Linebaugh’s and Rediker’s “red” Atlantic is firmly focused on a colo-
nial and revolutionary era ending in 1830, a little-cited literature on the “proletarian mass
migrations” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century (which I discuss more fully below)
suggests a history beyond that date for the “red” as well as for the “black” Atlantic.
As this suggests, a critical mass of scholarly specialists on “white,” “black,” and “red”
Atlantics now questions whether its network of connections should be treated so exclu-
sively as an early phenomenon that trails off after 1800 with national revolutions and
nation-building. Whether a longer Atlantic history should extend to 1888, as J.R. McNeill
has suggested36 or into our own times—as the persistence of NATO, however troubled,
makes plausible—requires a more thorough discussion of the Atlantic after 1800. Ulti-
mately, I argue that the changing place of the Atlantic in the wider world provides the
most compelling grounds for periodization.
An Atlantic “World”
Most specialists acknowledge that the course and geography of world history altered
dramatically around 1500.37 It is no surprise that the vast majority of studies of the Atlantic
32
Cooper, Holt, and Scott, Beyond Slavery.
33
Harris, ed., Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora; Palmer, “Defining and Studying the Modern African
Diaspora,” 22–25.
34
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Mintz, Sweetness and Power.
35
Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea; Linebaugh and Rediker, “The Many-Headed Hydra,”
225–253; Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra.
36
McNeill, “The End of the Old Atlantic World,” 245–268.
37
Green, “Periodization in European and World History,” 13–54; see also Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction
and Periodization in World History,” 749–770.
6 DONNA GABACCIA
have focused firmly on transatlantic colonization, emergent capitalism and class relations,
slave trade, and democratic revolutions in the three centuries after 1500. Nicholas Canny
has argued that “This emphasis on the nearly self-contained character of the various
spheres of European interest in the Atlantic in itself explains why our subject of study
for the early modern period should be Atlantic history rather than global history”; for
Canny, the compelling argument is a geographical one—during this time, the Pacific was
a “barrier not a conduit.”38 Others—especially Asianists who argue for the continued
marginality of Europe and its Atlantic into the nineteenth century—might not so readily
agree with Canny.
This early Atlantic neither extends far inland nor incorporates many of the indigenous
peoples of the interiors of the Americas or Africa, whose own circuits of trade and migration
as often moved north and south—continentally—as east and west. The Caribbean looms
particularly large in the geography of the early Atlantic, for it was where all of Europe’s
colonial powers met, along with large numbers of African slaves. Nevertheless, and to a
considerable degree, French, Dutch, English, Spanish, and Portuguese colonization of the
Atlantic, along with the Africa slave trade that accompanied it, constructed distinctive
and only partially overlapping Atlantics.
For both reasons, it is somewhat surprising that so many researchers of the centuries
after 1500 have settled comfortably into the habit of referring to their object of study as the
Atlantic “world.”39 In doing so, many presumably follow the precedent of Braudel with his
studies of the Mediterranean.40 Yet most would also readily acknowledge that the Atlantic
lacks the climatic and geophysical unity that Braudel found in the Mediterranean. In any
case, the Atlantic “world” that early modern historians imagine is definitely not the wider
world about which globalists write, nor has any specialist claimed it was. Historians of the
Atlantic “world” are quite aware that European explorations and colonization—notably
by the Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, and English—had reached into the Pacific and into
Asia well before 1800. Trade within Europe and Europe’s trade with Asia may even have sur-
passed trade across the Atlantic. Africa too stretched well beyond the Atlantic, and it had
been connected to Asia for centuries by trade across the Indian Ocean.41 Nor was Africa
exclusively a source of slaves for the Atlantic, as slaves continued to be sold into a trade
that connected sub-Saharan Africa to the overland trade routes of western Asia.42
Despite Atlantic historians’ intensive recent work on Europe’s encounters and
exchanges with indigenous American societies and cultures, Africa and Africans, slaves,
women, and the maritime and urban poor, their preference for describing the Atlantic as
38
Canny “Writing Atlantic History,” 1192.
39
A primitive measure of the spread of the term comes from Hollis Online Catalog of Harvard University. Of 58
book entries that contain the term “Atlantic World,” 44 were published after 1990.
40
The term “Atlantic World” was, used prior to publication of Braudel’s work on the Mediterranean. See “The
Atlantic World,” by the long-forgotten intellectual, psychologist and novelist, Frank, in his book, America
Hispana. Diplomats involved in international relations also used the term already in the early 1940s. See,
for example, the work of a former Norwegian foreign minister, Raestad, Europe and the Atlantic World. An
early argument for viewing the early modern Atlantic as a distinctive world is Davies, The North Atlantic
World in the 17th Century.
41
Barendse, The Arabian Seas; Chaudhuri, Asia before Europe.
42
Manning, Slavery and African Life.
a “world” duplicates in some ways a narrative of world history best expressed in William
H. McNeill’s The Rise of the West, published in 1963,43 or its equivalent in political
economy, Wallerstein’s The Modern World System, published in 1974.44 In the intervening
years, world historians have largely abandoned this narrative; they now prefer histories
that emphasize connections among world regions—in short, histories of globalization.45
Although only a few specialists venture to write about globalization between 1500 and
1800,46 most specialists will recognize main elements of globalization—technologies of
transportation and communication, long-distance migrations of merchants, workers and
slaves, the mobility of capital and ideas, trade and commerce, and empire-building—as
key elements in the formation of the early Atlantic.47
World histories of globalization have begun to problematize the Atlantic world by
assessing its relation to other regions in the world. It seems highly unlikely that the Atlantic
will become marginal in global histories of the centuries after 1500. Still, the economic pre-
eminence nature of the Atlantic as an independent “world” or even as the core of a world
system as described by Wallerstein is by no means a settled matter. Debates now rage
among world historians about the relative economic development of Europe and Asia
between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.48 With estimates of the volume and
significance of trade and migration around the Chinese Seas, and Indian and Pacific
Oceans, or across the trade routes and steppes of central Asia still underway, the relative
significance of Atlantic and Pacific in the aftermath of their maritime connection cannot
yet be properly assessed. At the very least, however, it seems that the writing of new
world and global histories require Atlanticists to reconsider their vision of the Atlantic as a
self-contained oceanic world from which the west or modern capitalism arose and spread.
Accustomed to longer temporal frames, world and global historians may also have
indirectly raised levels of skepticism that 1800 marks the demise of the Atlantic “world.”
The year 1800 is very firmly institutionalized in teaching about the Atlantic. Nevertheless,
researchers have become ever more varied in choosing end dates for their studies, and
they consider Atlantic “worlds” that persist until 1815, 1830, or even 1888. I conclude
from my own reading of recent scholarship that colonial, cultural, and economic ties
43
McNeill, The Rise of the West.
44
For many world historians of the 1980s and early 1990s the foundational text remained McNeill’s A World
History, which he now describes as an expansion of somewhat earlier book The Rise of the West. For a critique
of this older civilizational paradigm, see Gran, Beyond Eurocentrism. Some advocates of global history view it
as an alternative to a world history that they view as still too mired in civilizational analysis to grasp the glob-
ality of the present: Mazlish, “Comparing Global to World History,” 385–395. As far as I know, O’Reilly’s paper
“Genealogies of Atlantic History,” 66 –84, this issue, is the first effort to address the extent to which Atlantic
History carries the burden of Euro-centric world history and its assumptions about western civilization.
45
At its simplest, globalization refers to the growth, proliferation and thickening of quite specific—and often
very ordinary—types of connections between various regions of the earth. On definitions and theories of
globalization from an historical perspective, see Hopkins, “Introduction: Globalization—An Agenda for
Historians,” 1–10.
46
Pietschmann, Geschichte des Atlantischen Systems, 1580–1830.
47
Pomeranz and Topik, The World that Trade Created; Hoerder, Cultures in Contact; Abernethy, The Dynamics
of Global Dominance; Bentley, “Cross-Cultural Interaction and Periodization in World History,” 749–770;
Headrick, When Information Came of Age.
48
See the polemical exchanges between Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and Frank, ReOrient;
Pomeranz, The Great Divergence; Wong, China Transformed.
8 DONNA GABACCIA
among Africa, Europe, and the Americas began to unravel after 1750 but that they did so
gradually, with differing rhythms and consequences. For the next century, the very changes
that undermined the earlier Atlantic “world” were creating a new Atlantic, with a new
geography, and place in the world.
The first set of changes emerged from opposition to colonialism itself. An early and
temporarily successful challenge to Spanish colonization had occurred deep in the interior
of what is now the American southwest. By the end of the eighteenth century, change
came less from the continental peripheries than from the coastal Atlantic. Successful
challenges to English colonization of the Atlantic both began well before 1800 and con-
tinued well after that date. As warfare among the colonial powers intensified between
1756 and 1815, a long sequence of anti-colonial rebellions in North and South America,
Europe (let us not forget Poland and the Cisalpine republics), and the Caribbean unfolded.49
The American revolution of 1776 was only the opening salvo. Spain and France also lost
Atlantic colonies to independence movements 1808 and 1824.50 The Monroe Doctrine
of 1823 may done little to hasten the course of decolonization (which persisted into the
1860s, 1880s and 1890s in places as diverse as Italy, Canada, Brazil, and the Caribbean)
but it nevertheless proclaimed US opposition to further European empire-building in
the Americas. Equally important was the emergence of Black Nationalism, which began
with calls by emancipated American slaves to return to Africa and persisted into the
anti-colonial movements of the second postwar ear of the twentieth century.51
A shift toward the democratic self-governance that triumphed in the US, France,
and Haiti in the late eighteenth century—if indeed such a shift is, in fact, occurring around
the Atlantic—has been an even more protracted process and is still very obviously incom-
plete.52 Communication among republicans in Europe, Latin America and North America
nevertheless flourished during the age of anti-colonial revolutions, creating informal and
transatlantic precursors to the “internationals” that emerged later in the nineteenth century.53
In the wake of anti-colonial and republican evolutions, ideologies of nation building
also attempted to rewrite Atlantic cultural connections. The United States initially pro-
nounced its intention to build a new and American civilization independent of Europe’s,
while Latin American nations more often promised to perfect European civilization in a
new environment.54 Eighteen hundred did not usher in an era of firm or uncontested
nation building in the Americas. On the contrary, it was only in the 1850s, 1860s, and
1870s that Canada, Argentina, the US, Mexico, Germany and Italy emerged from lengthy
periods of internal political turmoil and civil wars to establish national boundaries and
forms of governance that would persist into the next century.
While not always inspired by economic interests, nationalist revolutions certainly had
profound economic consequences throughout the Atlantic. Patriotic North Americans were
49
McNeill, The Age of Gunpowder Empires; Fred Anderson, The Crucible of War.
50
Archer, The Wars of Independence in Spanish America; Rodríguez, The Independence in Spanish America.
51
Gordon, Black Identity; Glaude, Exodus!
52
Stavrianos, Global Rift; Diamond, The Democratic Revolution; Dunn, Democracy.
53
Geggus, The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World; Weisberger, McLeod, Morris, Freemasonry
on Both Sides of the Atlantic.
54
Shumway, The Invention of Argentina.
keenly interested in challenging British mercantile policies, in large part because Britain’s
industrial revolution and colonial military policies created such burdens for the colonials.
In the South Atlantic, a desire for freer trade with the British was a motivating factor in
rebellions against Spain. For the new US, de-colonization meant boycotts of trade with
Britain and the imposition of tariffs intended to build national industries on the ruins of
colonial trade. For Mexico and the Plata republics, independence instead meant welcoming
British, French, Dutch, and German investors with such enthusiasm that most quickly
suffered debt crises that complicated the course of nation building.55 Even in Britain, a
definitive move against mercantilism and the ideological triumph of the doctrine of
free trade was not complete until the 1840s and 1850s. In much of continental Europe,
furthermore, it would never be accepted.
Similarly, the central economic institutions of the early Atlantic—the slave trade,
slavery, and tropical plantations—did not disappear in 1800. Abolitionism emerged as
an Atlantic movement in the middle years of the eighteenth century and the agitations
of abolitionists in the Americas, Europe, and Africa continued for a full century.56 Emanci-
pation of slaves through revolts began well before 1789, but it was not completed until the
last decades of the nineteenth century in places such as Brazil and Cuba. Plantations—
along with their distinctive and often extremely brutal systems of labor recruitment and
discipline—continue to operate in our own times.57
Whether it was slavery or not that had generated the capital that made possible
Britain’s industrial revolution, slavery’s demise, along with the anti-colonial and nationalist
revolutions of 1776–1898, transformed both economic relations within the Atlantic and
European ideologies of colonization. Between 1750 and 1850, globalization in the Atlantic
seemed under attack in every corner. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to describe the
century or more after 1750 as little more than a backlash against globalization, against
the rise of the west, or against the consolidation of a modern world system.58 Hostility
to empires, to their cultures and ideologies and to their major economic institutions
itself generated new transatlantic connections and new universalizing ideas emphasizing
the unity of all humankind. The gradual demise of the Atlantic “world,” was very much a
product of what Jeremy Brecher and colleagues, examining our own era, have termed
“globalization from below.”59 As the Atlantic “world” disappeared in the century after
1750, a new Atlantic was appearing.
An Atlantic “Economy” in the Era of Industrialization

Largely unremarked by historians studying the early Atlantic “world,” liberal
economists have been discussing a nineteenth century Atlantic “Economy”—rooted in
55
Adelman, Republic of Capital.
56
Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution; Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom; Eltis, Economic
Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade; Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition.
57
Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex.
58
I borrow the concept of globalization generating a backlash from O’Rourke and Williamson, Globalization
and History: the Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy.
59
Brecher, Costello and Smith, Globalization from Below.
10 DONNA GABACCIA
the process of industrialization and responding to rapid population growth in centers of

industrial change—at least since the Cold War era of the 1950s.60 More recently, economic
historians Kevin O’Rourke and Jeffrey Williamson have responded to contemporary debates
about globalization by labeling the years between 1850 and 1914 the “industrial era of
globalization.”61 They focus exclusively on movements of labor and capital in the countries
surrounding the Atlantic, ignoring nineteenth-century European empire building in Africa
or Asia as an element of globalization. Nevertheless, they present their analysis as quanti-
tative evidence that by 1850 the Atlantic had become the undisputed central arena of
global economic exchange.
Economic and intellectual historians, along with historians of technology and inter-
national migration, also now seem to agree that globalization began some time in the
middle of the nineteenth century, thickening and transforming older networks of Atlantic
connection. Technological changes of the early nineteenth century seem particularly
important in creating the foundation for the Atlantic “economy” of the nineteenth
century. On the seas, after the middle years of the nineteenth century, the transition
from sail to steam made international mass migration feasible.62 Well into the twentieth
century, it remained faster and cheaper—not merely more common—to travel from
Europe or the Americas across the Atlantic than to travel across the Indian Ocean or
Pacific. While the laying of underwater cables was scarcely limited to the Atlantic, a parti-
cularly dense and secure transatlantic network of high-speed communication had
connected Europe and the Americas by 1900.63
Capital generated by Britain’s industrial revolution was the second important foun-
dation for the nineteenth century Atlantic “economy.” That European and largely British
capital and rails made early railroad building possible throughout the Atlantic—even in
the US—can scarcely be denied.64 By 1900, substantial British capital was invested in rail-
roads in the US, Canada, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Latin America more generally, while
British investments in railroad-building in Africa and India were only beginning to
expand.65 Nor was the export of capital around the Atlantic initiated solely by British
bankers and contractors; French, Dutch, and German investments in Latin America and
the Caribbean were especially important, but Canada and US also regularly sought and
60
Thomas, Migration and Economic Growth.
61
I resist the temptation to distinguish between an earlier “industrial” era of globalization and a late-
twentieth century period of “post-industrial” globalization. Such labels seriously misrepresent the conse-
quences of globalization for Africa, much of Latin America, and Asia. For a somewhat different terminology
but similar periodization, see Bayly, “Archaic” and “Modern” Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena.”
Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, 179–180 instead refers to the years between 1870
and 1914 as a take-off phase of globalization, interrupted by wars—hot and cold—and global depression.
While I am uncomfortable borrowing such teleological social science from Walt Rostow, I am otherwise sym-
pathetic to this notion, as it highlights similarities in class and labor relations in industrial worksites as they
relocated geographically.
62
Taylor, The Distant Magnet, ch. 7– 8.
63
Gordon, A Thread Across the Ocean.
64
Jenks, The Migration of British Capital to 1875; Rippy, British Investments in Latin America; Platt, Foreign
Finance in Continental Europe and the United States.
65
Rippy, The Rivalry of the United States and Great Britain over Latin America; Rippy, British Investments in Latin
America, 96– 98.
found capital from the continent.66 Britain’s free trade policies also sparked the creation or
expansion of new export-oriented enterprises in the Americas. Argentina’s key exports
(hides, beef, and wheat) traveled directly to consumers in Europe, and especially to Great
Britain.67 Nor did the development of tropical plantations in Europe’s newer colonies in
Australia, southern and southeastern Asia and Africa after 1850 signal the demise of Atlantic
plantations; they continued to demand new laborers, especially after the abolition of the
slave trade and the emancipation of slaves.
Corporations based in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the US all engaged in
extensive transatlantic trade in the nineteenth century, employing persons of varied
national backgrounds. Singer sewing machines were sold throughout the Atlantic by the
1870s; Pittsburgh-based H.J. Heinz opened a branch in London as early as the 1880s and
sought to do business as well in Germany.68 Like the transatlantic cables, shipping lines,
along with their business practices, corporate organization, class dynamics, and thousands
of maritime workers (ranging from ships’ captains, merchant seamen, chefs, and dock-
workers) formed a particularly dense network of connections.69 International construction
companies, with their mobile engineers, contractors, and navvies provide similar evidence
of the continued importance of Atlantic business in transition from merchant family
dynasties to large, modern corporations.70 Few Atlantic corporations would today be
considered multi-national: only rarely did they possess production sites or sales forces
dispersed in many countries. Most were instead what Mira Wilkins calls free-standing
corporations which raised capital in one country to invest in another country while
employing mangers and workers from the third country which was home to the investors.71
Transatlantic migrations of laborers followed in the steps of European capital and
employers. The 65 million Europeans traveling across the Atlantic to the Americas
between 1830 and 1930 built industrial infrastructures—factories, railroads, cities,
roads—farmed homesteads or worked on sugar, coffee, or bananas plantations in the after-
math of slavery’s abolition.72 Drawing on both Wallerstein and liberal economist Brinley
Thomas, the German historian of the Americas, Dirk Hoerder, in the 1980s pioneered
studies of what he called the proletarian mass migrations of the Atlantic “economy.”73
Brazil and Argentina were just as much nations of immigration and “lands of promise”
during this era as was the US.74 Mass emigrations from Italy linked northern and southern
Atlantic migratory circuits, and point to the oft-ignored importance of international labor
66
For example, for continental Europeans’ investments in North American railroads, see Kabisch, Deutsches
Kapital in den USA; Veenendaal, Jr, Slow Train to Paradise.
67
For example, Topik and Wells, eds, The Second Conquest of Latin America.
68
Gabaccia, “As American as Budweiser and Pickles,” 175–193; Davies, Peacefully Working to Conquer the
World.
69
A social history of the workers of the Atlantic shipping companies and docks would complement existing
works such as Fox, Transatlantic.
70
See Gabaccia “Constructing North America: Transnational Railroads and Continental Space in the Atlantic
Economy, 1850–1914.”
71
Wilkins and Schröter, The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy.
72
Nugent, Crossings.
73
Hoerder, Labor Migration in the Atlantic Economies.
74
Baily, Immigrants in the Lands of Promise; Lesser, Negotiating National Identity; Moya, Cousins and Strangers;
Baily and Míguez, Mass Migration to Modern Latin America.
12 DONNA GABACCIA
migrations within Europe even in the nineteenth century.75 Canada drew its immigrants
mainly from the British Isles, while Mexico received relatively small numbers of immigrants
who nevertheless had a very big impact on the development of urban trades, businesses,
and industries.76 While new countries in the Americas generally sought newcomers as set-
tlers to re-populate inland regions cleared of indigenous Americans, a substantial minority
of migrants in the Atlantic “economy” were instead sojourners or “birds of passage,” who
returned home, often preceded by substantial flows of cash in the form of remittances.
Intellectual historians, too, now describe the nineteenth-century Atlantic—in somewhat
distinctive northern and southern variants—as an important arena of cultural exchange. In
intriguing ways, newer studies of intellectuals and ruling elites complement earlier work on
exchange within the “black” Atlantic and the African diaspora. James Kloppenberg and
Daniel Rodgers have focused on the mobility of key political ideologies in the North Atlantic;
social historians have added studies of the ongoing connections among those men (and
almost as many women) who considered themselves cosmopolitan social reformers, social
engineers, and Progressives.77 Feminist scholars also point to transatlantic ties among
women evolving from a female anti-slavery movement into a self-conscious movement for
women’s rights.78 The export of European culture through migratory artists, actors, and musi-
cians, and the reverse “pilgrimages” of the rising elites of North and South America to the cul-
tural shrines of western civilization in Europe are less well known, as is the north Atlantic
marriage market that bound the elites of the English-speaking North Atlantic Triangle into
family intimacy.79 For Latin Americans, Paris, not London, was the significant European cultural
capital. The Atlantic-wide spread and influence of racial science through the works of the
English-speakers Darwin and Spencer had its parallel in the influence of French positivism in
Latin America.80 Recent publications by younger scholars also point to transatlantic Catholic
exchanges, intensified by sizeable migrations from Ireland, Germany, and Italy.81
Much like historically minded theorists of globalization, historians and economists
have reached no firm agreement about how to date the end of the nineteenth-century
Atlantic “economy.” Privileging industrialization and migrations of labor and capital over
empire building, O’Rourke and Williamson cease their analysis of the Atlantic in 1914.82
The subsequent Russian revolution and the withdrawal of the USSR from Europe’s entan-
gling alliances strengthen their argument. So does the rise of Japan as an Asian empire-
75
Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas; Gabaccia and Ottanelli, Italian Workers of the World; Gabaccia and
Iacovetta, Women, Gender and Transnational Life.
76
Ramirez, “Canada in the United States”; Buchenau, “Small Numbers, Great Impact.”
77
Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings; Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory; Wikander, Kessler-Harris and Lews, Protecting
Women.
78
Rupp, Worlds of Women; Anderson, Joyous Greetings; McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy.
79
Montgomery, “Gilded Prostitution.”
80
See also n. 17. Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny; Glick, The Comparative Reception of Darwinism; Graham,
The Idea of Race in Latin America.
81
Moloney, American Catholic Lay Groups and Transatlantic Social Reform in the Prgressive Era; D’Agostino,
Rome in America.
82
Their evidence for this, especially as related to migration, is useful but not ultimately convincing. It ignores
the significance of migrations within Europe, especially to France in interwar years, and the substantial
numbers of new entries (including those reunifying families in the US under new restrictive laws) that per-
sisted until the late 1920s.
builder in Asia. Still, the persistence and even expansion of European empires, the revival of
world trade and the pace of international diplomacy (especially as sponsored by the new
League of Nations) in the 1920s may ultimately provide better arguments for making the
great depression—not World War I—the ending date for the nineteenth century’s Atlantic
“economy”.83
It seems unlikely, at least for the moment, that attention to “globalization from
below”—will provide the same help in resolving debates over the periodization of the
Atlantic “economy” that they did for the Atlantic “world.” Studies of the “red” and
“black” Atlantics in this era suggest radically different chronologies of change. While
clearly emerging within the wider world of the global British Empire, Pan-Africanism typi-
cally linked those of African descent in the Caribbean, Africa, and the Americas.84 The
rise of Marcus Garvey and of Black Nationalism and the activities of anti-colonial and
Pan-African congresses were particularly visible in the early years of the twentieth
century but all lay foundations for anti-imperial and anti-racist movements that continue
to the present.85 By contrast, the “red” Atlantic seemed almost to disappear after the
1914 collapse of the Second International. Millions of labor migrants of the proletarian
mass migration of the Atlantic “economy” had responded to anarchist, syndicalist, and
socialist versions of Marx’s call to the “working men of all nations” to “unite.”86 Nevertheless,
by World War I, it was clear that the labor internationalists of the Atlantic had lost their
battles both with nationalists and with international capital; just as Japan increasingly
challenged from the Far East the conventions of an imperial world governed from Europe,
revolution and labor internationalism now emerged from the center of Eurasia, in the USSR.
The movement “from below” that may have most fundamentally altered the Atlantic
“economy” was sparked by the arrival of the Chinese in Australia and North America in 1849
and 1850. The abolition of the slave trade and plantation slavery in the Americas had almost
immediately inspired experiments in importing indentured labor from China (in Panama,
Peru and Cuba).87 Indians from Britain’s largest colony became an important source of
plantation labor even in the Caribbean.88 Free and voluntary migration around and
across the Pacific also increased. From the 1870s, Australian, Canadian, and US labor move-
ments vehemently protested what they called the “yellow peril” and demanded the
exclusion of workers from Asia.89 Although more continental or Pacific than transatlantic
in its network of connections, this movement’s economic impact far exceeded those of
“red” or “black” Atlantic movements. Racial hostility to both contract and free labor from
Asia soon extended in all three countries to hostility to the far more numerous migrants
of southern and Eastern Europe. Openly nationalist and racist immigration restrictions on
migration were passed in not only the US, Canada, and Australia, but worldwide in the
83
Klein, Rainbow’s End.
84
Geiss, The Pan-African Movement.
85
Carr, Black Nationalism in the New World. See the work of Plummer, Window on Freedom; Plummer, Rising
Wind.
86
Gabaccia and Ottanelli, Italian Workers of the World.
87
Lai, The Chinese in the West Indies; Hu-DeHart, “Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers.”
88
Kale, Fragments of Empire; Lai, Indentured Labor, Caribbean Sugar.
89
Price, The Great White Walls are Built.
14 DONNA GABACCIA
1920s and 1930s. What had begun as a campaign against the Chinese ultimately ended in
the permanent termination of the relatively free migration that accompanied Britain’s com-
mitment to free trade.90
Clearly, the Atlantic had changed fundamentally over the course of the nineteenth
century, both in its geography of transcontinental and transnational connections and in
its place in the wider world. With the cessation of the slave trade, and renewed European
empire building in the second half of the nineteenth century, only Pan-Africanism kept
Africa’s westward connections alive. Patterns of international migration reflected the
change: after 1820, transatlantic European emigrants outnumbered African slaves. Equally
important in re-arranging Atlantic geography were the population policies and strategies
for expansion inward in new nations such as the US and Canada (with their westward orien-
tations) and Mexico (which instead sought to consolidate its hold over northern provinces).
Deeply interested in expanding its influence in its own hemisphere after its war with Mexico
in 1847 –1848, and having reached the Pacific as a result of that war, the US was determined
(as were also Canada and many Pacific-facing nations in Latin America and Australia) both to
increase trade with China and Japan and to exclude Asians as settlers.91
Equally obvious is that the Atlantic “economy” of the late nineteenth century was
much less a separate world than it had been in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries.
It was certainly more firmly connected to the Pacific—through Europe’s global empires,
through systems of transport and trade, through continent-spanning countries like the
USA or Canada, and even through migration flows. World historians continue to debate
even the economic centrality of the Atlantic in this era. For example, migration historian
Adam McKeown now argues that just as many persons left Asia or moved about
within Asia as left Europe for the Americas in a long nineteenth century stretching from
1830 to 1930.92 If he is correct, then Atlantic-centered analyses of globalization (such
as the one by O’Rourke and Williamson) will certainly need revision and correction. For
world historians, the century between 1815 and 1914 “when the sun never set on the
British empire” might better be portrayed as a global and imperial “British century”93
than as an Atlantic “economy.” Once again, however, the fracturing of an older Atlantic
was creating the foundation for new, if profoundly altered and reduced, Atlantic
connections.
An Atlantic “Community” in the “American Century”

Not for nothing do scholars in international studies call the twentieth century the
“American century.”94 Henry Luce may have invented the term only in 1941 but historians
generally date the beginning of America’s century to the 1890s and to the rise of the United
90
This is the argument of Daniels in Not Like Us, recently deepened and elaborated by Lee, At America’s Gates.
91
Hart, Empire and Revolution.
92
McKeown, Global Migration, 1846–1940; cited with permission of the author.
93
Cumings, “The American Century and the Third World,” 299.
94
See also Adas, “From Settler Colony to Global Hegemon,” 1692–1720. It is quite striking that a wide variety
of world historians treat the twentieth century as distinctive, both in their teaching and writings: see the early
statement by Geyer and Bright, “For a Unified History of the World in the Twentieth Century,” 69–91.
States as an industrial, financial, and imperial power.95 We can of course portray American
expansionism in many ways—as dollar diplomacy, as fulfillment of old missionary impulses,
as the export of capital, as classical imperialism or cultural imperialism or merely as a liberal
desire to complete the separation of the American republics from dynastic Europe.96
Whether we view the rise of the US as part of a backlash against an era of globalization
driven largely by British capital employing European workers or as the forging of a new
constellation of global connection, the implications for the Atlantic seem obvious.
The new Atlantic alliance that Walter Lippman termed a “community” of like-minded
western democracies reflected the interests and ideals of the United States—a country
of continental dimensions with strong interests not only in the adjoining Atlantic but in
the Pacific, too.
Actions by the US in the early twentieth century had certainly contributed dispro-
portionately to the demise of the Atlantic “economy.” By restricting immigration from
southern and eastern Europe while leaving migration within the American hemisphere
unrestricted, and by ending its exclusion of Asians in the 1940s and 1950s, the US struck
it a major blow. (By the 1960s, the majority of immigrants to the US no longer came
from Europe but from Latin America and the Caribbean and from Asia.97) While World
War I bankrupted Britain, halting flow of British capital around the Atlantic, the US decision
to raise tariffs with the onset of the Great Depression precipitated a downward spiral in
Atlantic commerce as other nations followed suit.
The rise of the US is not just a tale of backlash against British global hegemony or the
circuits of nineteenth century globalization in the Atlantic. It is a tale of growing global,
not merely Atlantic, hegemony of the US. The Spanish-American war of 1898 gave the
US colonies in both the Pacific and the Caribbean, where previously only American busi-
nessmen and investors had ventured, precipitating a competition with the Japanese that
would ultimately end in war in the Pacific. During the same decade, the first US-initiated
programs for pan-Americanism were as inextricably connected to these events as to the
country’s Monroe Doctrine. American capital had not yet challenged British capital world-
wide in 1890. It nevertheless provided the grounds for American intervention, first in Hawaii
and then somewhat later in Caribbean and Latin American political affairs. American capital
not only bankrolled the battles of World War I, but also underwrote the disastrous financial
solutions to postwar peacemaking.98 Despite its political isolationism in the 1920s, finan-
ciers and US capital continued as major guarantors of the economic health of a global
95
The historiography on the American century provides support for any of these dates. See Brinkley, “The
Concept of the American century,” 7 –12; Zunz, Why the Amerian Century? For an analysis of a long 20th
century, see Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century. For an analysis of a short century, see Hobsbawm, The
Age of Extremes. Whether or not the American century is now finished is also a matter of debate, compare
White, The American Century and Hardt and Negri, Empire.
96
There is a huge literature on the expansion of the US, and its impact on American life. Representative of the
newer work that emphasizes the cultural consequences of the rise of the US in the world is Amy Kaplan, The
Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture.
97
Barkan, And Still They Come.
98
Much new work focuses on the expansion of US investment abroad and the development of a more expan-
sive US foreign policy: Veeser, A World Safe for Capitalism: Dollar Diplomacy and America’s rise to Global Power;
Rośenberg, Finanaical Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930.
16 DONNA GABACCIA
economy through that decade. Unfortunately, as many learned in 1929, when the US stock
market sneezed, the entire world caught cold.99
So too, the impact of the liberal and internationalist values expressed by American
President Woodrow were not limited to the Atlantic. Wilson’s support for national self-
determination in 1918 was ultimately implemented only in Europe, but it was nevertheless
heard, and its implications understood, in both Africa and Asia, providing new fuel for
well-established anti-imperial movements from 1920 through the end of World War II.100
In the aftermath of the second war, the US, along with its victorious (but again financially
bankrupt) allies, built the current institutions and agreements that would structure our own
era of globalization—the United Nations, IMF, GATT the WTO.101 In its Cold War against
Communism, the United States, its capital and businesspersons, its “military-industrial
complex,” and its cultural diplomats and CIA offered aid and advice anywhere in the
world that Communism seemed to threaten.
It would be pointless to argue that the Atlantic lost all significance as the era of
European imperial hegemony gave way to the American century. On the contrary, the
Atlantic Alliance formed during World War II (minus the USSR, for many years, of course)
persists to this day. A sizeable and interdisciplinary literature on NATO confirms its
importance, as do studies of the Cold War, Marshall Plan and nation building in Germany.102
In the past decade, a lively and equally interdisciplinary literature by European specialists on
American culture and by diplomatic and international historians of the US has tackled the
complex issue of America’s impact on Europe. Whether understood as the Americanization
of Europe, coca-colonization, cultural imperialism or free world liberalism, scholars generally
assume that the most important exercises of US influence internationally have occurred
within the Atlantic.103
Still the Atlantic of the past half century seems in almost every way a narrower and
more limited network of connections than in the past. Whether because of US empire
building, vast investments and vigorous intervention in the affairs of its American neigh-
bors, or merely the legacy of Atlantic racism or Latin American popular nationalism
expressed through repressive military regimes, much of the Caribbean and Latin America
remained apart from the Atlantic “community.” As Africa and Asia de-colonized, Latin Amer-
icans developed their own mechanisms for escaping the burdens of American
neo-colonialism; anti-communist and populist nationalist military rulers enjoyed firm ties
to the US even as revolutionary movements fostered anti-Americanism from below.104
A focus on the North Atlantic and on relations between west Europe and the US has
also narrowed Atlantic studies to studies of a “white” Atlantic. Evidence for a “red” Atlantic is
almost entirely absent for the past half-century, with the possible exception of the years
around 1968. By contrast, a “black” Atlantic has certainly persisted—often uncomfortably—
alongside the white Atlantic “community” of the late twentieth century. Nurtured as in
99
Rothermund, The Global Impact of the Great Depression.
100
Benjamin Heater, National Self-determination.
101
Zeiler, Free Trade, Free World.
102
Schmidt, A History of NATO.
103
Here the seminal work is Wagnleitner, Coca-coloniszation and the Cold War.
104
Scowen, Rogue Nation.
the past by communication among those active in anti-colonial, nationalist, and civil rights
movements, and fostered by new post-colonial migrations from Africa and the Caribbean
to both North America and northern Europe, the black Atlantic has expanded and extended
into the present the geographies of earlier Atlantics.105 Unlike the “white” Atlantic, the “black”
Atlantic connects Africa, the Caribbean, North America and the US. It is curious, however, that
Latin America—with its myths of racial amalgamation and of racial democracy—has remained
until very recently an outsider even to studies of the “black” Atlantic.
However we date the onset of our own most recent era of globalization, whether to
the 1970s (détente, the US withdrawal from Vietnam, the rise of OPEC), to the 1980s
(de-industrialization in the first world; industrialization in the third world and the rise of
the Asian “tigers”) or to 1989 and the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, it
seems hard to argue that the Atlantic occupies as central a place in the wider world as it
did in 1650 or even 1850. The rise of the US, with its mission to spread both representative
democracy and capitalism globally, has re-shaped global connections as profoundly as
did European empire building in the nineteenth century. While transatlantic tourism and
cultural exchanges are certainly significant, and while NATO survives (however battered),
the containerized shipping of goods along Atlantic sea routes is now much less impressive
both quantitatively and qualitatively than its Pacific Rim counterparts.106 The mass
migrations of our own era of globalization do not travel east and west across the Atlantic,
but rather across the Pacific, or, within hemispheres, from the new, poor, post-colonial and
“third world” or “southern” countries to North America or Europe. New alliances—NAFTA,
the EU, and OSEAN—propagate regional and continental economies as among the most
vigorous of our own world. In a time when airlines more than oceans connect, the Atlantic,
along with the place of the Atlantic in the world, has become decidedly more modest, even
as Atlantic studies have flourished.
Conclusion
This is not to suggest that Atlantic Studies will function mainly as gravedigger for
the watery Atlantic. On the contrary, much work remains to be done. As the periodization
I offer might suggest, one challenge for Atlanticists is to attempt longer-term analyses of
particular Atlantic phenomena. Such specialized studies would provide the groundwork
for a much more nuanced analysis of the transition from one Atlantic to another than I
was able to provide here. Ideally, however, such studies should approach analyses of
Atlantic from the broader frame of world history or of globalization. The transition from
an Atlantic-based capitalist world system to an Atlantic economy within an industrial
world system dominated by Britain’s empire deserves study, as do the complex conse-
quences for the rise of the US as a world power linking Pacific and Atlantic in the twentieth
century.
105
See, e.g. Foner, Jamaica Farewell; Goulbourne and Chamberlain, Caribbean Families in Britain and the
Trans-Atlantic World.
106
Cumings, “The American Century and the Third World,” 299; see also Jones, Frost and White, Coming Full
Circle; Dirlik, ed., What is a Rim?; and Calder, Lamb, and Orr, Voyages and Beaches.
18 DONNA GABACCIA
A second remaining challenge for Atlanticists is to reunite the somewhat separate

streams of “red,” “black” and “white” Atlantic world and Atlantic economy, and to take
up the equally difficult task of bringing studies of the Latin and North Atlantic into dialogue
at least within the early Atlantic “world”. Needless to say, opportunities for connecting
specialized studies of Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanic Atlantic can be explored
not only in the early Caribbean but also Atlantic-wide. Such works of synthesis, if viewed
from a global perspective, would also contribute substantially to world historians’ assess-
ments of the place of Atlantic culture in the wider world.
Finally, Atlanticists in all disciplines would be well advised to venture more often
across disciplinary boundaries in their reading. American Studies may have provided the
paradigm for the creation of other area and regional studies during the Cold War but its
disciplinary foundation—it was been built largely around a collaboration of historians
and literary scholars—has not yet been firmly established for studies of the Atlantic.
Many seminal studies of the Atlantic “economy” and of the twentieth-century Atlantic
“community” instead emerged from the social sciences (notably economics, politics, and
international relations). Literary and cultural studies of the Atlantic have proved occasion-
ally influential (consider particularly the work of Paul Gilroy) but still deserve more space in
the interdisciplinary dialogue.
Studies of particular regions in Atlantic context also seem a promising way to assess and
revise the geographies and periodization of the three Atlantics that I have described in this
paper. Why do Latin America and Africa so often seem irrelevant not only in studies of the
twentieth-century Atlantic but in world histories of the recent past? What difference does
it make that the international connections of Africa shifted with emergence of each new
Atlantic? Does this mean that change in Africa provided the impetus for change in the
wider Atlantic in ways we have not yet appreciated? Similarly, continental histories—whether
of Europe, North or South America, Europe or Africa—might be attempted more often from an
Atlantic perspective. The continental movements that preceded the formation of the early
Atlantic (along with the continental economies that now threaten to replace the North Atlantic
“community” represented by NATO) could both integrate the study of inland and indigenous
peoples into the study of the early Atlantic and provide some clues to the changing place
of continental and central Europe, Africa and Latin America in the twentieth century Atlantic.
Atlanticists also share with globalists the huge challenge of gendering their analyses
of change and continuity. While specialists on empire building and colonization have made
considerable progress in exploring how gender interacted with class and racialization in
colonial systems, scholars working within world systems and liberal economic analyses
have not come so far. Analysis of gender among Italy’s millions of Atlantic migrants
points to the crucial role of language in constructing differing gender ideologies in the
Latin and Anglophone Atlantic.107 It also suggests that understanding the changing sex
ratios and the private relations among the multifarious migrants, seamen, and slaves
who crisscrossed the “red,” “black” and “red” Atlantics over time might be a good way to
begin the badly needed gender analysis of transnational phenomena.
107
Gabaccia and Iacovetta, Women, Gender and Transnational Life.
Whatever the current fate of the Atlantic “community,” Atlantic Studies seems
unlikely to disappear soon. Still, whether as historians or students of culture Atlanticists
would be well advised to take seriously globalist critics of their peculiarly Atlantic parochi-
alisms. We cannot know what new Atlantic—if any—might emerge from the waning of its
immediate predecessor or whether the globalizing imperative of the 1990s will give way to
new particularisms, most plausibly in resurgent nationalisms worldwide. If this is the case,
then the questions that scholars across the disciplines ask about the Atlantic will almost
certainly change. However, when have scholars have ever needed a firm sense of where
the world is going in order to tackle the unresolved questions of the past? The vast and
long Atlantic still beckons. My most fervent hope is that Atlanticists who follows its call
will not mistake it for the world.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In addition to the feedback of participants in the Sussex Atlantic Studies workshop,
the author particularly thanks Marcus Rediker, members of the University of Pitts-
burgh Atlantic History Seminar, and Rick Halpern.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Donna Gabaccia is the Mellon Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh,
where she currently teaching a seminar on the Modern Atlantic. Recent publications
include Immigration and American Diversity, Italy’s Many Diasporas, and We are What
We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans. She has also co-edited collections
of essays with Franca Iacovetta and Fraser Ottanelli called Women, Gender and
Transnational Life and Italian Workers of the World: Labor, Migration and the Making
of Multi-Ethnic States.
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Donna Gabaccia, Mellon Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA

15260, USA. Tel: (412) 648 7478; Fax: (412) 648 9074; Email: drg6@pitt.edu

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A LONG ATLANTIC IN A WIDER WORLD

KEYWORDS global history; historiography; Atlantic world; periodization; Cold

Atlantic Studies, Vol. 1, No 1, 2004

the awareness of the “world as a whole”—helped to problematize academic area studies

Many Atlantics: a Brief Historiography

almost contemporaneously the Carnegie Endowment initiated a major research project on

An Atlantic “Economy” in the Era of Industrialization

the process of industrialization and responding to rapid population growth in centers of

An Atlantic “Community” in the “American Century”

A second remaining challenge for Atlanticists is to reunite the somewhat separate

Donna Gabaccia, Mellon Professor of History, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA

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