E Anna 672 0391

For a Comprehensive History of the Atlantic World or
Histories Connected In and Beyond the Atlantic World?

Cécile Vidal, Translated from the French by Michèle R. Greer
In Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales Volume 67, Issue 2, 2012, pages 279 to 300
Publishers Editions de l’E.H.E.S.S.
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For a Comprehensive History
of the Atlantic World
or Histories Connected
In and Beyond the Atlantic World?*
Cécile Vidal
“If the concept of Atlantic history is fairly new ... the practice is not,”1 state Philip

Morgan and Jack Greene in the introduction to their book offering a critical assess-
ment of this “new” field of study, which has been explored in the United States
for the last twenty years. The French scientific community would not be surprised
by such a statement, having never forgotten Pierre and Huguette Chaunu’s work
on Seville and the Atlantic or the controversy that opposed Robert Palmer and
Jacques Godechot against Albert Soboul regarding the concept of the Atlantic
revolution in the 1950s.2 The French and European academics who were writing
about such topics as the Atlantic “space,” the Atlantic “economy” or even the
“Atlantic civilization” when the Atlantic Charter was signed and NATO was first
This article was translated from the French by Michele Greer and the Translating Cultures
Group at the American University of Paris (Erica Buchinski, Courtney Gebhard, Breanna
Grove, Madeleine LaRue, Jesse Tucker Lichtenstein, Kevin Vaughn, and Rachel Veroff),
revised by Cécile Vidal, and edited by Angela Krieger and Stephen Sawyer.
* About Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan, eds., Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan, eds, The
Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
1. Philip D. Morgan and Jack P. Greene, “Introduction: The Present State of Atlantic
History,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 4-5.
2. Huguette and Pierre Chaunu, Séville et l’Atlantique, 1504-1650 (Paris: SEVPEN, 1955-
1959), 8 vols.; Jacques Godechot and Robert R. Palmer, “Le problème de l’Atlantique
du XVIIIe au XXe siècle,” in Relazioni del X Congresso internazionale di Scienze Storiche,
vol. V, Storia contemporanea (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1955,) 175-239. 279
Annales HSS 67, no. 2 (April-June 2012): 279–300.
207195 UN06 23-10-12 14:39:50 Imprimerie CHIRAT page 279

CÉCILE VIDAL
established, however, had a very different idea of Atlantic history in mind from
that developed in the late 1960s at The Johns Hopkins University in the United
States with the Atlantic History and Culture program. This is because American
historians already accorded an important place not only to communication between
Europe and the New World, but also to relations between Africa and the Americas,
as studies of the Atlantic slave trade multiplied.3 However, the idea of Atlantic
history did not fully emerge until the 1990s, when it attracted more attention
in North America through the Harvard University seminar on the history of the
Atlantic world.4
This more recent approach differs from earlier works on the Atlantic in two
ways. First, it relates to all the historiographical currents that, in the 1990s, were
once more interested in the phenomena of globalization during the early modern
period but differed from Fernand Braudel’s and Immanuel Wallerstein’s earlier
works.5 The new Atlantic history is thus a transnational history that experiments
with new scales of analysis in which the nation is no longer the main historical
frame of reference. According to Alison Games, it is a form of world history applied
to a particular space and time: the Atlantic world formed by connections and net-
works developed between Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the fifteenth to
the nineteenth centuries.6 Atlanticists promote a new unit of analysis that juxta-
poses and includes other areas of focus (kingdom, colony, empire, continent, etc.).
Furthermore, rather than corresponding to a specific political entity, it is centered
on an ocean. It concerns the period during which the Atlantic Ocean went from
being a barrier to being a bridge, multiplying transnational and trans-imperial

relations and thereby bringing both banks together. Like other historiographies
such as subaltern studies, postcolonial studies, new imperial history or connected
history, Atlantic studies aims to move away from a history of the first globalization
written solely from a European or Western point of view: Africans and Native
Americans are considered full participants in this phenomenon alongside Europeans,
and a resolutely “multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial” approach is favored.7
3. The most important European practitioners of this early Atlantic history who had not
yet thought of themselves as such were H. Hale Bellot in England, Jacques Godechot,
and Pierre Chaunu in France, Jacques Pirenne and Charles Verlinden in Belgium, Vitorino
Magalhães Godhino in Portugal, and Max Silberschmidt in Switzerland. For an overview
of their work, see Bernard Bailyn, “The Idea of Atlantic History,” in Atlantic History:
Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 3-30.
4. From 1995 to 2010, this prestigious American university, with support from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, brought together annually a different group of young
historians who were writing or had just completed their thesis for a workshop around
a particular theme related to the history of the Atlantic world. The program involved
366 young researchers from 202 American universities and 164 foreign universities. See
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~atlantic/.
5. Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris:
Armand Colin, 1979), 3 vols.; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New
York: Academic Press, 1974-1989), 3 vols.
6. Alison Games, “Teaching Atlantic History,” Itinerario 23-2 (1999): 163.
280 7. Ibid., 167.

ATLANTIC HISTORY
This constant decentralizing and shifting of scales are justified by the interpretative
ambition of Atlantic history, which “is concerned with explaining transformations,
experiences, and events in one place in terms of conditions deriving from that
place’s location in a large, multifaceted, interconnected world.”8
This conceptualization of the Atlantic analytical framework and the formula-
tion of this research program—without which a true Atlantic history is inconceiva-
ble—emerged as debates were organized and forums, collective works, and other
theoretical essays were published.9 The field of Atlantic studies is characterized
by its strong capacity for critical reflection, both with regard to the premises upon
which such studies are based and how they develop in practice. This has become
necessary for two main reasons. On the one hand, the various empirical works that
have been published over the last twenty years under the title of Atlantic history
encompass a broad range of approaches and fields, with research that takes different
and even contradictory directions. Despite significant efforts to define its pur-
pose and methods, the Atlanticist community has resisted all attempts to identify,
order, and give a single definition and orientation to the field.10 On the other hand,
while Atlantic studies was quickly implanted and institutionalized in the United
States, it has incited much discussion and resistance, particularly from world histo-
rians.11 Paradoxically, in recent years, it has also helped the emergence or renewal
of other analytical frameworks, such as imperial history, continental history or
hemispheric history, which attempt to accompany or replace the Atlantic perspec-
tive. Hence the need to publish works that seek to collect and make sense of this
disparate and heterogeneous production in order to respond to critics and position

itself vis-à-vis other historiographical proposals.
8. Ibid., 163.
9. In addition to the works already cited, see: “The Nature of Atlantic History,” special
issue, Itinerario 23-2 (1999): 48-174; Marcel Dorigny, ed., “L’Atlantique,” special issue,
Dix-Huitième Siècle 33 (2001); Horst Pietschmann, ed., Atlantic History: History of the
Atlantic System, 1580-1830 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002); Alison Games,
“Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical
Review 111-3 (2006): 741-57; Alison Games and Adam Rothman, eds., Major Problems in
Atlantic History: Documents and Essays (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Allan Potofsky,
ed., “New Perspectives in the Atlantic” Project, History of European Ideas 34-4 (2008): 383-
455; Cécile Vidal, ed., “L’histoire atlantique de part et d’autre de l’Atlantique,” Nuevo
Mundo, Mundos Nuevos, 2008, http://nuevomundo.revues.org/index10233.html; and
Bernard Bailyn and Patricia L. Denault, eds., Soundings in Atlantic History: Latent Struc-
tures and Intellectual Currents, 1500-1830 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
10. See the typology of different concepts of Atlantic history (“circum-, trans-, cis-Atlantic
history”) proposed by David Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” in The
British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, eds. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11-27.
11. Peter A. Coclanis, “Drang Nach Osten: Bernard Bailyn, the World-Island, and the
Idea of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 13-1 (2002): 169-82; “Forum: Beyond
the Atlantic,” The William and Mary Quarterly 63-4 (2006): 675-742; Pierre Gervais,
“Neither Imperial, Nor Atlantic: A Merchant Perspective on International Trade in the
Eighteenth Century,” History of European Ideas 34-4 (2008): 465-73; and Patrick Griffin,
“A Plea for a New Atlantic History,” The William and Mary Quarterly 68-2 (2011): 236-39. 281

CÉCILE VIDAL
Assessing a Generation of Atlantic Studies

Regularly faced with the proclamation that Atlantic history is dead, the two works
published under the direction of Jack Greene, Philip Morgan, and Nicholas
Canny12 seek to proclaim that, after twenty years of facing challenges, the field is
in fact still very much alive, continuing to remain relevant and to interest future
researchers. Both volumes were published by Oxford University Press, which has
played an important role in diffusing Atlantic history in the Anglophone world,
notably with the Oxford Bibliography on Atlantic History.13 Though their perspectives
are similar and complementary, they do not follow the same approach. Greene and
Morgan’s volume is a collection of epistemological and historiographical essays: the
authors provide an update on the status of research, compare the advantages and
limitations of the Atlantic approach, discuss the complementary or competitive histo-
riographies, and identify the most promising and innovative directions in research.
After several textbooks already offering a synoptic view of the development
of the Atlantic world,14 the longer work by Canny and Morgan offers a synthesis
or survey that takes the form of a narrative in four parts. These four parts correspond
to the four stages of the Atlantic world’s evolution, from its emergence to its
disintegration through its consolidation and integration between the mid-fifteenth
and mid-nineteenth centuries. The book further provides a series of more explora-
tory essays on new research topics (such as family, environment, law, and sciences)
or on more established subjects (such as migration, commerce, modes of settle-

ment, and religion), the study of which is revitalized by adopting a comparative
and transversal approach. The terms “handbook” in the title or “survey” on the
back cover, therefore, do not do justice to the ambitious and innovative nature of
12. Jack Greene is now Professor Emeritus in the History Department at The Johns
Hopkins University, which spearheaded a “program in Atlantic history and culture” in
the late 1960s. Along with Bernard Bailyn, who provided an important contribution
to the emergence of Atlantic history when he began his Atlantic History seminar at
Harvard University in 1995, Greene is one of two major tutelary figures of American
colonial history and the American Revolution, shaping several generations of “colonial-
ists” since the 1970s. Also affiliated with the same history department at Johns Hopkins
is Philip Morgan, known as one of the greatest contemporary historians of slavery in
the British colonies. Born in Great Britain, where he completed his studies and began
his university career, Morgan then migrated to the United States, participating in the
very process of internationalization in higher education and research that, according to
Bailyn, has played such an essential role in the emergence of Atlantic history. Nicholas
Canny, the eminent specialist of early modern Ireland, also crossed the Atlantic several
times from his native Ireland to write his thesis and start his career in the United States
before taking a position at the National University of Ireland in Galway. Bernard Bailyn,
“Preface,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800, eds. David Armitage and Michael
J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), XIV-XX, here XVI-XVII.
13. http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/browse?module_0=obo-9780199730414.
14. Douglas R. Egerton et al., The Atlantic World: A History, 1400-1888 (Wheeling: Harlan
Davidson, 2007); Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and
282 their Shared History, 1400-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

ATLANTIC HISTORY
a volume that seeks to lend impetus to Atlantic studies by embracing the whole
of the Atlantic world in both its diachronic and synchronic dimensions. It also
proves an essential tool for introducing students and young researchers to a difficult
field of research that requires both a broad historical knowledge of history and a
mastery of many historiographical fields.
By the late 1990s, Greene and Canny had written the first two articles pre-
senting and theorizing Atlantic history.15 As the title of Canny’s essay indicates,
this was first a reconfiguration of British colonial American history. Initially, Atlantic
studies was reproached for its focus on the British Atlantic and its generally Euro-
centric propensity, despite its explicit intentions to develop a transnational, multi-
ethnic, and polycentric history. The two works discussed here, however, attest to
the significant effort to correct these early mistakes and fulfill all the promise of
Atlantic history by focusing as much on the Spanish, Portuguese, French or Dutch
Atlantic as the British Atlantic or by looking at the Africans and Native Americans
as well the Europeans, although the geographic origins of their contributors are
much less diverse than the variety of populations and territories explored.16
These works offer an invitation to travel not just from one corner of the Atlantic
world to the other—from Lisbon, Ceuta, the Rhine valley or the Sokoto Caliphate
to Philadelphia, Tlaxcala, the Illinois Country, Salvador de Bahia or Patagonia,
passing by the Azores, São Tomé, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland or even
the Bermudas—but also into the different historiographies that have focused on the
Atlantic world in part or as a whole from the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries.
This historiographical decompartmentalization, which the authors of these

works unanimously present as the main advantage of the Atlantic approach, must
be understood in all its magnitude and complexity. This does not only involve the
works produced since the idea of Atlantic studies imposed itself in the 1990s.
Indeed, this new historiographical trend has multiple, deeply-rooted origins.17 It
rests on the intersection and reformulation of different colonial, imperial, and
Atlantic histories: the old Imperial School, the first Atlantic history that appeared
in the 1940s and 1950s, colonial American history transformed by the rise of the
new social history from the 1950s and the 1960s, ethnohistory and the new Indian
15. Jack P. Greene, “Beyond Power: Paradigm Subversion and Reformulation and the
Re-Creation of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in Interpreting Early America: Historio-
graphical Essays (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 17-42; Nicholas
Canny, “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of British Colonial
America,” Journal of American History 86-3 (1999): 1093-114.
16. Together these two books called upon fifty contributors (of which only three wrote
a chapter for both books). Aside from some notable exceptions, a large majority of the
authors are native English speakers who hold positions in Anglophone universities. It
is regrettable that the books’ editors did not seek to further internationalize Atlantic
studies by integrating more European, Caribbean, Latin American, and especially
African historians, who are largely underrepresented in these historiographical and edito-
rial enterprises.
17. William O’Reilly, “Genealogies of Atlantic History,” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cul-
tural and Historical perspectives 1-1 (2004): 66-84; Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and
Contours. 283

CÉCILE VIDAL
history, and the history of the Black Atlantic with its proliferation of works on
the slave trade, slavery, and the African diaspora of the 1970s. All these historio-
graphical approaches now being explored on both sides of the Atlantic present a
major development because, as Laurent Dubois argues, to rise above national or
regional historiographical frameworks “generates new questions, new connections,
and points us to hitherto neglected bodies of historical evidence” and “can help
us understand historical links between regions, as well as to broaden our analyti-
cal and methodological imagination by encouraging us to think comparatively
across regions.”18
Beyond this common purpose, both works slightly differ in their tone as well
as their level of conviction and degree of enthusiasm for the Atlantic approach. A
comparison of both titles highlights a shift from a more theoretical reflection on
Atlantic history, which is more critical and circumspect, to an affirmative and para-
digmatic empirical proposition on the history of the Atlantic world. The difference
between an Atlantic history and a history of the Atlantic world may at first glance
appear specious, but it is in fact fundamental. In a way, it reflects the two main
options available for the future of Atlantic studies, as presented by Jack Greene and
Philip Morgan in their introduction, in which they provide a valuable abridgment
of the various positions: according to Nicholas Canny, there have been as many
conceptions of the Atlantic world and opinions on how to pursue Atlantic history
as there are Atlanticists!19 A close reading of the over fifty chapters in both books
reveals numerous nuances in the different authors’ positions, even if they all com-
pletely agree on the importance of the Atlantic approach. Whether their approval

is tepid or ardent, supporters have the choice between, on the one hand, an Atlantic
history offering a comprehensive and comparative framework of analysis that puts
the works of specialists from different regions of the Atlantic world into perspective
and, on the other hand, the development of a veritable field of historical study
that would eventually encompass and replace earlier studies conducted on national
or imperial logics.20 Instead of providing a simple analytical framework, the Atlantic
world itself could become the object of study.
Which Atlantic History?

These two options concerning the future of Atlantic studies correspond to the
methodological and interpretative cleavage that divides Atlanticists and are related
to the blind spots of the Atlantic paradigm. This paradigm postulates that the
evolution of societies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean was greatly affected by
18. Laurent Dubois, “The French Atlantic,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds.
Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 167.
19. Nicholas Canny, “Atlantic History and Global History,” in Atlantic History: A Critical
Appraisal, eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009), 317.
284 20. Greene and Morgan, “Introduction,” 4-5.

ATLANTIC HISTORY
the relationships that linked Europe, Africa, and the Americas between the fif-
teenth and nineteenth centuries and, furthermore, that it is impossible to explain
their evolution without considering these Atlantic connections. This postulate,
which gives primacy to Atlantic circulation and exchange, conceals four unresolved
questions: the role of internal and external factors in the evolution of each society;
the importance of Atlantic dynamics compared to regional, continental, global or
other influences among the external forces affecting each of these societies; a better
appreciation of the consequences of mobility, circulation, and exchange, which
did not always have a transformative effect; and finally, the evaluation of the
differentiated impact of Atlantic interactions on Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
It is thus essential, as John Elliott clearly emphasizes, to try to avoid the “natural
temptation to exaggerate the extent to which one side of the Atlantic influenced
developments on the other, perhaps in an effort to prove the writer’s Atlanticist
credentials. But it needs to be recognized that there is no need to find a consistency,
and still less a progressive developments of interaction over time and space. At
some times and in some places the Atlantic component will figure strongly, while
at others it may well occupy a subordinate position. Tracing and explaining the
fluctuations in the degree of interaction between the whole and the parts is a
necessary element in the writing of Atlantic history.”21 The major issue is indeed
that of the relationship between the parts and the whole, as well as the contradictory
and simultaneous processes of integration and fragmentation, though this issue
arises both within and beyond the Atlantic world.
This is perhaps due to the fact that, as it has been indicated many times, the

Atlantic world is an anachronistic category that was not employed by contemporary
participants and that the most pertinent critics have been proponents of global
history because they consider the world scale as being better suited than the
Atlantic scale to the phenomena they analyze. As a result, some Atlanticists have
attempted to prove the existence of a “reasonably coherent and autonomous”
Atlantic world over the course of the early modern period while recognizing some
fragmentation, diversity, and porosity.22 However, as Alison Games has shown,
“this emphasis on integration reveals a particular European-centred bias in the
study of Atlantic history. ... Yet from the perspective of North America, and espe-
cially from an indigenous perspective, the Atlantic world hardly needed to be
integrated in order to have an enormous impact on its inhabitants’ lives. Whether
or not American tribes lived tightly under French, Spanish, or English dominion,
for example, or outside the areas of European settlement, their lives could be
profoundly altered by the presence of these Europeans powers and the disruption
they caused in community life.”23
21. John H. Elliott, “Afterword: Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in The British

Atlantic World, 1500-1800, eds. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 240.
22. Canny, “Atlantic History and Global History,” 320.
23. Games, “Teaching Atlantic History,” 167-68. 285

CÉCILE VIDAL
Atlanticists may therefore be tempted to favor a “mobile” and “connective”

Atlantic history that would be one of circulation and exchange at the origin of the
formation and increasing integration of the Atlantic world or, on the contrary, a
“localized” Atlantic history that would analyze the impact of these connections on
the internal evolution of connected societies, which would consequently increase the
emphasis on the diversity and fragmentation of the Atlantic world. As Morgan and
Greene recall in their introduction, Elliott clearly advocates this alternative, unlike
David Armitage and Games.24 In the wake of the latter, some authors such as
Nicholas Andrew Martin Rodger deplore the fact that “rather too often, ‘Atlantic
history’ is history with a hole in the middle. The Atlantic is treated as a pre-defined,
self-evident space which serves as a sort of rhetorical device to define the peoples
living around its shore. It is not regarded as something requiring any historical
analysis or explanation in itself. This sort of Atlantic history is history with the
Atlantic left out.”25 Although communication should not be totally confused
with Atlantic seafaring, as it was bound by a prolonged mobility by land or by
river,26 Rodger, a specialist in naval history, proposes to once again make Atlantic
history a maritime history, which was the case in early works on the Atlantic from
the 1950s and 1960s.
Nowadays, should Atlantic studies focus on the ocean or ignore the open sea
in favor of its shores? Behind this debate is the broader question of what constitu-
ted the Atlantic world: the connections themselves or the catalysts that brought
them into being, namely the colonialist and imperialist endeavors of the Western
European powers. Clearly, the relationship between the two seems necessary but

insufficient. Otherwise, the Atlantic world would, as most Atlanticists argued, not
have disintegrated in the early nineteenth century, even as the Atlantic slave trade
persisted illegally for much of the nineteenth century and migration from Europe
to the Americas increased through the early decades of the twentieth century.
Furthermore, as Donna Gabaccia has clearly shown, “well into the twentieth cen-
tury, 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 particular dense and secure transatlantic network of high-speed commu-
nication had connected Europe and the Americas by 1900.”27 The emphasis on
24. Armitage, “Three Concepts of Atlantic History,” 16; Games, “Atlantic History,”
745-46 and 754-55; Greene and Morgan, “Introduction,” 7; and Elliott, “Afterword,”
237-38.
25. Nicholas Andrew Martin Rodger, “Atlantic Seafaring,” in The Oxford Handbook of the
Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 71.
26. For works on communications in the Atlantic world, see: Ian K. Steele, The English
Atlantic, 1675-1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986); Kenneth J. Banks, Chasing Empire Across the Sea: Communications
and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 2002).
27. Donna Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in the Wider World,” Atlantic Studies: Literary,
286 Cultural and Historical Perspectives 1-1 (2004): 10.

ATLANTIC HISTORY
circulation—with this hyper-mobility even being celebrated, which may seem

somewhat surprising given the weight of forced migration—also makes one forget
that the vast majority of people who inhabited the Atlantic world from the fifteenth
to nineteenth centuries never crossed the ocean at all. However, they were no less
affected by the Atlantic dynamics than those who had experienced transtlantic
migration firsthand. The conceptualization of the Atlantic world based on the sheer
volume of connections and the degree of interaction perhaps causes Atlanticists to
lose sight of what their main purpose should be: the redefinition and renegotiation
of power relations and issues between individuals, groups, and socio-political
formations in an interconnected world, driven by the expansionist ambitions of
European and African political and business elites—worldwide in Western Europe
and at the regional level in West Africa.
These divisions can also be found in the different perspectives of Native-
American and African specialists. As reflected in Amy Turner Bushnell’s essay,
scholars studying the Indians are without a doubt the most reticent toward Atlantic
history, particularly because Native Americans are the only Atlantic players not to
have participated in the mass migration, forced or free, that sparked the formation
of the Atlantic world.28 Nonetheless, the Americas were no less a “New World”
to them than to the Europeans and Africans that landed there: “Native People, of
course, did not literally travel to this Indians’ New World, but the changes forced
upon them were just as profound as if they had resettled on unknown shores.”29
The arrival of migrants from Europe and Africa led to many native migratory
movements and the creation of new communities within the American territories

but also to limited phenomena of transatlantic mobility between the Western
Hemisphere and Europe.30 The editors of the Handbook of the Atlantic World thus
put much emphasis on the fact that “the history of native societies and habitats
through our period is, therefore, one of continuous change and adaptation rather
28. Amy Turner Bushnell, “Indigenous America and the Limits of the Atlantic World,
1493-1825,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip
D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 191-221. See also: Paul Cohen,
“Was there an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits of a Historiographical
Concept,” History of European Ideas 34-4 (2008): 388-410; Pekka Hämäläinen, “Lost in
Transitions: Suffering, Survival, and Belonging in the Early Modern Atlantic World,”
The William and Mary Quarterly 68-2 (2011): 219-23; and Claudio Saunt, “‘Our Indians’:
European Empires and the History of the Native American South,” in The Atlantic in
Global History, 1500-2000, eds. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman (Upper
Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007), 60-75.
29. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 41.
30. On indigenous migrations in North America, see notably Colin G. Calloway, New
Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997). Among the numerous works on the Indians in Europe,
see: Eric Hinderaker, “The Four Indian Kings and the Imaginative Construction of
the First British Empire,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53-3 (1996): 487-526; Alden
T. Vaughan, Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009). 287

CÉCILE VIDAL
than termination.”31 Yet, some historians, remain convinced that continental his-
tory, rather than Atlantic history, is a much more appropriate means of reflecting
the views of Native Americans, and the fact that during the early modern period
much of (North) America remained, in practice, “Indian Country” or areas that
were borderlands in which imperial rivalries allowed the indigenous people to
maintain their sovereignty and exercise their agency.32 Daniel Richter and Troy
Thompson demonstrate, however, that this would not have been possible without
the existence of the Atlantic world by showing that, on the contrary, from the mid-
eighteenth century “the collapse of European empires ... severed connections that
had once guaranteed indigenous autonomy.”33
The Africanist perspective is somewhat different. David Eltis begins his
essay on the Atlantic slave trade by emphasizing that, while Africa locates itself
halfway between the Americas and Europe in terms of the impact of Atlantic
dynamics,34 “yet if we shift the focus to changes in the nature and size of connec-
tions between the continents as opposed to changes within them, the most striking
development between the 1640s and the 1770s relate to Africa, not Europe or the
Americas.”35 Since the pioneering work of Philip Curtin in the late 1960s and
the completion of the transnational database containing almost thirty-five thousand
slaving voyages—thanks to which the forced transatlantic migrations of Africans
are more well known than the voluntary migrations of Europeans—the break-
through in slave-trade studies has in fact demonstrated that before 1820 around
four Africans arrived to the Americas for each European, and about four out of
every five females who traversed the Atlantic came from Africa.36 They therefore

31. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, “Introduction: The Making and Unmaking of
an Atlantic World,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas
Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 3.
32. The continental scale also allows one to take into better account the Pacific coast
and relations between the Americas and Asia. See: Paul W. Mapp, “Atlantic History
from Imperial, Continental, and Pacific Perspectives,” The William and Mary Quarterly
58-4 (2006): 713-24; Peter H. Wood, “From Atlantic History to a Continental Approach,”
The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip
Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 279-98. For a recent example of the
continental approach, see Paul W. Mapp, The Elusive West and the Contest for Empire,
1713-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
33. Daniel K. Richter and Troy L. Thompson, “Severed Connections: American Indige-
nous Peoples and the Atlantic World in an Era of Imperial Transformation,” The Oxford
Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 499.
34. For a comparison of the differentiated impact of the Atlantic dynamics on Europe,
the Americas, and Africa, see the three essays in “Old Worlds and the Atlantic,” the
second part of Morgan and Greene’s book: Jack P. Morgan and Philip D. Greene, Atlantic
History: A Critical Appraisal (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2008), 189-275.
35. David Eltis, “Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade, Mid-Seventeenth to Mid-
Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds.
Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 271.
36. Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1969); “Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,” http://www.slave
288 voyages.org/tast/index.faces.

ATLANTIC HISTORY
played a fundamental role in the formation of new societies and cultures in the
New World: “That the Americas before 1840 were more an extension of Africa
than Europe is now a commonplace.”37 As Philip D. Morgan strongly summarizes,
“in the early modern era, Africans were more important to the Atlantic world
than the Atlantic world was to Africans”38—which harks back, however, to the
confusion of the Atlantic world with the Western Hemisphere. From one phenome-
non—the slave trade—marked as it was by violence and destruction, thus emerged
a creative force.39
This reversal along with the comparisons between Europeans, Africans, and
Native Americans in terms of connections or impact might seem surprising, but
they translate the fact that Atlantic studies is driven by an obsession with demon-
strating the agency of all Atlantic actors and not only the Europeans, without whom
there would not be an Atlantic world. How does one write the history of coloniza-
tion, the slave trade, and slavery without adopting the sole point of view of the
“conquerors” and without minimizing the relations of domination? Responding to
historiographies that had for a long time maintained a distinct Eurocentric bias,
the tendency since the 1960s has been toward “revisionist” histories—to borrow a
term that belongs to the American historiography of slavery—of which the principal
paradigm involves the agency of “non-Europeans.” With Atlantic studies, there
has been a shift from the history of European expansion to that of the encounter
between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans.40
The term “encounter,” however, may be considered a euphemism. It allows
one to avoid a certain teleological vision and provides clear evidence that colonial

domination was neither immediately imposed, inevitable, nor complete and that
the “winners” were not always only the Europeans but could, at any given time
and depending on local circumstances, include the African and Native-American
elite and peoples. However, the expression does to some extent minimize the
European colonialist and imperialist project and suggests that the three populations
somehow found themselves in a position of equality or played the same driving
role in Atlantic dynamics. This perspective is still situated at the other end of the
spectrum, always insisting more on the agency of the “colonized” at the expense
37. Trevor Burnard, “Review: Empire Matters? The Historiography of Imperialism in

Early America, 1492-1830,” History of European Ideas, 33-1 (2007): 100.
38. Philip D. Morgan, “Africa and the Atlantic, c. 1450 to c. 1820,” in Atlantic History: A
Critical Appraisal, eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 241.
39. From this point of view, see Jean-Frédéric Schaub, “Violence in the Atlantic: Six-
teenth and Seventeenth Centuries” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-
1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
113-29. This interesting article presents a unique contribution to this volume because
Schaub is the only author to insist on the process of destruction as opposed to that of
creation and because he is one of the rare historians to take European societies into
account. He emphasizes the simultaneous and correlative growth of violence on both
sides of the Atlantic but without examining how relations became violent in Native-
American and African cultures.
40. Canny and Morgan, “Introduction,” 2. 289

CÉCILE VIDAL
of colonial rule rather than considering it a project that was never fully realized
and which demanded constant efforts to try to impose itself and analyzing all forms
of domination and resistance as intrinsically linked phenomena. Paradoxically, by
insisting on resistance, historians cannot pay attention to what did or did not depend
on the colonial situation in the African and Native-American societies that were
integrated or located on the fringes of European Atlantic empires, since the evolu-
tion of these societies was not always the result of their relations with Europeans.41
The notion of “encounter between Europeans, Africans, and Indians” could
also lead one to ignore the fact that the conditions of the interactions between
these three populations were not the same in space and time, and it therefore does
not sufficiently contextualize and historicize these “encounters,” while simultane-
ously lending a culturalist inflection to the way in which they were designed and are
understood. How long was the “encounter?” How long did individuals and groups
remain strange(rs) to each other and when did they begin to live in a common
world, even if power relations continued to maintain a distance between them?
Similarly, it seems problematic to subsume the relations between, for example,
African rulers and merchants and European traders in the slave trading outposts
of West Africa and those between masters and slaves in colonial and slave societies
in the Americas under the same expression of “encounter between Europeans and
Africans.” Reducing people primarily to their own ethnic and cultural backgrounds
cannot account for the complexity of the phenomena at work. While many histo-
rians now rightly insist on the fact that these are individuals—not political forma-
tions, societies or cultures—who meet and interact, these interpersonal encounters

always take place in socio-political configurations and represent different degrees
of a power struggle, which both transcend cultural and ethnic differences, particu-
larly when they are reduced to oppositions between “Europeans,” “Africans,” and
“Native Americans.” The macroscopic view imposed by the Atlantic scale can lead
to deadlock if it is not systematically combined with micro-historical studies at the
local scale based on a deconstruction of the categories born of the colonial rule
that the Europeans tried to impose.42 Thus, it seems necessary to continue to
develop historiographical experimentation in order to write a more complex history
of the first manifestations of globalization and its relationship to European colonial-
ism and imperialism.
41. On the notion of colonial situation, see the seminal article by Georges Balandier,
“La situation coloniale : approche théorique,” Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 11
(1951) : 44-79.
42. Lara Putnam, “To Study the Fragment/Whole: Microhistory and the Atlantic World,”
Journal of Social History 39-3 (2006): 615-30; Rebecca J. Scott, “Small-Scale Dynamics
290 of Large-Scale Processes,” American Historical Review 105-2 (2000): 472-79.

ATLANTIC HISTORY
The Impossible Panoptic Vision of the Atlantic World

Morgan and Greene’s extremely comprehensive and nuanced introduction takes
into account the limits of the Atlantic approach, the divisions that drive Atlantic
studies and the difficulties faced by Atlanticists. They also propose very interesting
directions for future research. The problem lies in the implementation of this
program by Canny, Morgan, and their colleagues in The Oxford Handbook of the
Atlantic World. This does not diminish the diligent work done by both publishers
and the international group of forty contributing authors who span three or four
continents across four centuries. The ambitious nature of the project and its approach,
the wide variety of territories addressed, the historiographies used and the themes
treated, the effort to reconcile and decompartmentalize regional or national historio-
graphies, and the coherence of the book despite the large number of contributors all
merit applause. However, structural choices regarding section and chapter divisions
raise certain questions, as it is impossible to hold together all the threads of the
Atlantic canvas. Since it is important to keep in mind what is gained and lost by
adhering to the Atlantic approach, as Trevor Burnard rightly points out,43 a reflect-
ive and critical look at ways of practicing Atlantic history would equally prove
useful. Given the great number of essays and their richness, it would be impossible
to discuss each chapter in detail. They will be principally commented upon by
looking at the question of the relationship between the part and the whole, this
time within the work.

The structure of the book reflects the editors’ conception of the Atlantic
world as “a complex system of trade, settlements and forced labour that linked
the three continents across the vast sea.”44 The problem is that they demonstrate
a greater interest in the commercial and imperial dimension controlled by the
Europeans than the diasporic and laborious dimension considered from the pers-
pective of Africans and Native Americans. While an entire section of Greene and
Morgan’s work was already devoted to them,45 ten of the Handbook’s thirty-seven
chapters concern the four national Atlantics, which are often confused with the
empires of the different European powers or the revolutions and wars of independ-
ence that brought about the end of these Atlantic empires. Stuart Schwartz’s essay
is interesting because the notion of an “Iberian Atlantic” serves to emphasize the
multiple intersections between the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic empires from
the early fifteenth century to the separation of the Crowns of Spain and Portugal
in 1640. The following article, written by Wim Klooster, covers the same period
43. Trevor Burnard, “The British Atlantic,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds.
Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 130.
44. Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Worlds of Europeans, Africans, and Americans, c. 1490,” in
The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip
D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21.
45. “Section One: New Atlantic Worlds,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds.
Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 53-187. 291

CÉCILE VIDAL
and insists on the role of private initiatives in this initial phase, as well as on the
interpenetration of fishing enterprises, trade, and piracy of Northwest Europeans.
For the subsequent period, other authors also make an effort to highlight that
the British Atlantic, for example, included merchants who traded well beyond the
borders of the British Empire or that a reconfigured French Atlantic survived
the end of the French empire in America after the Seven Years War.46 Nonetheless,
national Atlantics and empires are too often considered synonymous, the use of
the term “Atlantic” instead of empire simply leads to not problematizing the notion
of empire, especially that of Atlantic empire.47
These multiple chapters on different national Atlantics or Atlantic revolu-
tions can be accounted for by a desire to decrease focus on the British Atlantic,
therefore providing more space for the Portuguese, Spanish, French, and, to a lesser
extent, the Dutch Atlantic.48 It is also necessary to measure the advances repre-
sented by the development of a new historiography of, for example, the French
Atlantic empire, as the historiographies on Canada, Louisiana, the Caribbean, and
Guyana along with the slave-trading outposts on the West-African coast are still
largely compartmentalized. However, each time that previously ignored regions,
46. Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Iberian Atlantic to 1650,” in The Oxford Handbook of the
Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 147-64; Wim Klooster, “The Northern European Atlantic World,”
in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip
D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 165-80; Joyce E. Chaplin, “The

British Atlantic,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas
Canny and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 219-34; and Silvia
Marzagalli, “The French Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,”
D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 235-51.
47. For a reconsideration of empires in the Atlantic, see: Burnard, “Review: Empire
Matters?”; Jean-Paul Zuniga, “L’histoire impériale à l’heure de l’histoire globale. Une
perspective atlantique,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 54-4/5 (2007): 54-68;
Christopher Grasso and Karin Wulf, “Nothing Says Democracy Like a Visit from the
Queen: Reflections on Empire and Nation in Early American Histories,” Journal of
American History 95-3 (2008): 764-81; and Cécile Vidal, “Le(s) monde(s) atlantique(s),
l’Atlantique français, l’empire atlantique français,” Outre-Mers. Revue d’Histoire, 97-362/
363 (2009): 7-37.
48. No chapter is devoted specifically to the Dutch Atlantic, but the Dutch are included
in the chapter by Wim Klooster on “The Northern European Atlantic World,” in the
section covering the period from 1450-1650, and it is listed in a number of other essays.
For an excellent article analyzing why historians pay so little attention to the Dutch
Atlantic as well as the emergence and rapid collapse of a Dutch Atlantic empire under
the leadership of the Dutch West India Company in the middle of the seventeenth
century, see Benjamin Schmidt, “The Dutch Atlantic: From Provincialism to Global-
ism,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 163-87. The article also examines the following
subjects: how the Dutch Atlantic was reconfigured with a weaker mercantilist and impe-
rialist orientation and the simultaneous opportunity for Dutch expansion beyond the
Atlantic world, both of which allow the relationships between Atlantic history, imperial
292 history, and world history to be reconsidered.

ATLANTIC HISTORY
such as Angola and Brazil in the case of the Portuguese Atlantic, are linked the
authors call attention to the distinct characteristics of each national Atlantic. This
results in the image of a much more diverse and fragmented Atlantic world, particu-
larly for the period of 1650 and 1850, and runs counter to the general goal of the
project to demonstrate a certain unity and coherence. This essential task is rele-
gated to the third section of the volume entitled “Integration.”
Another consequence is the clear overrepresentation of Europe. The manner
in which the contributors write about the various national Atlantics differs greatly.
Some authors mention Native Americans and Africans alongside Europeans, while
others focus exclusively on European settlers, as Joyce Chaplin does in her essay
on the British Atlantic, which nonetheless proves to be an exciting addition because
she suggests deconstructing the British Atlantic or British-Atlantic empire while
examining the links between the English colonies and the British crown in 1707.49
In addition to these chapters, all three parts entitled “Emergence,” “Consolida-
tion,” and “Disintegration” contain at least one essay on Africa and Africans and
another on Native Americans. This conveys a desire to demonstrate equal interest
in Europeans, Indians, and Africans. However, the result is that although all the
authors highlight the variety of experiences between the different African or Native
regions/territories and “nations” in these articles, Native Americans and Africans
each appear as all-inclusive and undifferentiated categories in the chapter titles.
Meanwhile, the specificity of the different European powers and nations is posited
as a central and essential phenomenon.
Generally speaking, even though certain authors are very attentive to the

differences between categories of analysis and categories of practice or the vernacu-
lar categories used by historical actors, the categories advanced by historians could
have been further explored through a more reflexive and systematic analysis. This
question is particularly relevant with regard to the categories developed to account
for the mixing of populations, cultural exchanges, and the formation of new com-
munities generated by encounters between Europeans, Native Americans, and
Africans on both sides of the Atlantic. Do historians have to invent new terms at
the risk of reifying and essentializing designated groups, thereby confusing identity
and culture, or should they simply deconstruct the categories used by the actors
themselves to think about these complex phenomena? In the Handbook, one finds
both options. On the one hand, A. J. R. Russell-Wood evokes “some Portuguese,
Luso-Brazilians, Africans, Luso-Africans, and Afro-Brazilians and Afro-Luso-
Brazilians” in the same sentence without even trying to explain what is involved
in this cascade of designations.50 On the other, Robin Law states: “the terminology
49. Chaplin, “The British Atlantic.” See also the excellent chapter on the emergence
of the term “Atlantic”: Joyce E. Chaplin, “The Atlantic Ocean and Its Contemporary
Meanings, 1492-1808,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds. Jack P. Greene and
Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 35-51.
50. A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “The Portuguese Atlantic World, c.1650-c.1760,” in The
Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip
D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 212. 293

CÉCILE VIDAL
which historians have applied to these Europeanized elements in African societies

is problematic. They have often been called ‘Afro-Europeans’ (or ‘Euroafricans’
and other variants), which captures their cultural hybridity, but is of course a retro-
spectively invented term, not one that they themselves used.”51
The Africanist historian also implicitly refers to the term “Atlantic Creole,”
coined by Ira Berlin to designate “those who by experience or by choice, as well as
by birth, became part of a new culture that emerged along the Atlantic-littoral—in
Africa, Europe, or the Americas—beginning in the 16th century.”52 This expression,
currently in vogue among Atlanticists, creates confusion since the term “Creole”
was employed by contemporary actors across a complex range of situations.
Nonetheless, Canny and Morgan address it in their introduction. They argue that
“whether local populations embraced or repudiated hybridity, it was a fact, and
the emergence of creole populations throughout the Atlantic—however varied they
were—was proof of commonality.”53 Yet it seems difficult to ignore how historical
actors conceived of métissage in both its biological and cultural dimensions. Atlantic
dynamics were characterized less by mixing and exchange than by the differences
that the actors were continually seeking to recreate in order to justify their power
over each other. It is precisely the phenomena of ethnicization and racialization that
explain the emergence and construction of categories encompassing Europeans,
Africans, and Native Americans during the early modern period with which
Atlanticists somewhat paradoxically define their field. Indeed, the populations
from Europe, Africa, and the Americas who “met” in the Atlantic world hardly
thought of themselves as “European,” “African” or “Indian” before coming into

contact with each other. These categories of identification only became truly
meaningful in a context of confrontation, as Tamar Herzog demonstrates in her
remarkable article dedicated to identities and processes of identification in the
Atlantic world. Organized in three parts, the essay successively deconstructs cate-
gories of Europeans, Indians, and Africans in relation to all other categories of
identification along ethnic, racial, religious or social orders, while taking into
account the presence or lack thereof of each group on all three continents.54
This article concludes the third part, which is certainly the most innovative
of the volume because the chapters are thematically ordered and the authors seek
to “think comparatively,” as they had been asked by the editors,55 by comparing
different European populations as well as Europeans, Native Americans, and
51. Robin Law, “Africa in the Atlantic World, c.1760-c.1840,” in The Oxford Handbook
of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 589.
52. Ira Berlin, “From Creole to African: Atlantic Creoles and the Origins of African-
American Society in Mainland North America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 53-2
(1996): 254, note 8.
53. Canny and Morgan, “Introduction,” 13.
54. Tamar Herzog, “Identities and Processes of Identification in the Atlantic World,”
D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 480-95.
294 55. Canny and Morgan, “Introduction,” 1.

ATLANTIC HISTORY
Africans. Elizabeth Mancke’s stimulating essay on the (trans)formations of political

entities exemplifies this approach. It presents a new typology of political communi-
ties (“diasporic, niche, and consolidating and integrative polities”) that enables it
to take Europeans and “non-Europeans” into equal account and to offer another
political history of the Atlantic world rather than focusing solely on the issue of
constructing colonial and imperial states and the emergence of new nation states.56
These thematic chapters, however, raise some methodological problems.
First, despite declared intentions, most of them present a more connected or global
history rather than a true comparative history. As François-Joseph Ruggiu has
clearly shown, “a writing that combines elements borrowed from different areas
in the same descriptive movement is, in fact, no longer comparative history but it
is the history of a meta-space that becomes the object of study.” Only the smaller
scale, which allows national boundaries to be crossed, differentiates this type of
history from national history. Transnational history therefore “looks like the syn-
thetic or thematic history of a territory different from that of the nation state.” In
contrast, comparative history involves simultaneously balancing the object, scale,
and context, the latter serving as the explanatory variable. In the thematic chapters
of the volume, the absence of systematic contextualization of the phenomena
studied in different contact areas thus often leads to favoring description over
explanation, which is, however, the ultimate goal of the comparative approach.57
Furthermore, the choice of an Atlantic scale does not always appear justified based
on the object studied. This is the case, for example, in David Shields’s essay,
which raises an innovative history of sensibilities and emotions.58 By examining

each of the five senses, it appealingly shows how the first globalization of the world
led to new sensory experiences and transformed feelings of pleasure and pain. It
rightfully borrows its examples as much from Asia as Africa or the Americas but
without questioning the specificity of the Atlantic experience. Why then include
the expression “Atlantic world” in the essay title and such a chapter, as interesting
as it may be, in a volume on the Atlantic world?
The question seems even more relevant since the subjects were selected at
the expense of certain strictly “Atlantic” themes, such as slave systems and, more
generally, the various forms of forced labor, even though the crucial issues of labor
control and the formation of an international labor market were at the heart of
Atlantic dynamics.59 Similarly, the racial question is, surprisingly, rarely at the
56. Elizabeth Mancke, “Polity Formation and Atlantic Political Narratives,” in The
Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip
D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 383.
57. François-Joseph Ruggiu, “L’histoire comparée, méthode historique, pratique d’écri-
ture” (unpublished paper presented at a symposium on comparative and intersecting
history, EHESS, Paris, France, June 2, 2010).
58. David Shields, “The Atlantic World, the Senses, and the Arts,” in The Oxford Hand-
book of the Atlantic World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2011), 130-46.
59. Of the two essays that mention the term slavery in their title, one is primarily
dedicated to the slave trade and the other mainly to abolitionism, rather than the slave 295

CÉCILE VIDAL
center of the narrative, even if it appears here and there. Sylvia Frey has rightly
pointed out that “the emergence of racial ideologies and racial orders is one of the
great fault lines, perhaps the great fault line, in studies of Atlantic history. The
study of racial orders and ideologies makes it possible to examine Atlantic history
from a variety of different angles, a kind of intellectual compass that points in
all directions—to Europe, to French, Spanish and British colonies on the North
American mainland and to the British West Indies and the French and Spanish
Antilles; to the body and sexual identities as a crucial component of racial ideo-
logies; to the discourse of gender and race.”60
Not only has the choice to give considerable weight to national Atlantics and
Atlantic revolutions prevented multiplying the number of thematic essays, but it
has also deprived the chapters focusing on territorial and geographical divisions
from escaping the national and imperial European logics. Such articles would have
much more obviously highlighted, for example, the fact that there was not one but
two Atlantic slave trades that developed; that the indigenous experience differed
greatly in Indian Country, that is to say in the territories over which they remained
sovereign, in borderlands where neither Europeans nor Native Americans had the
means to impose their domination, and within colonial societies themselves; or
even to focus on areas where the empires specifically crossed and intermingled,
as in the great Caribbean.61
Nevertheless, the volume is marked more by an American-centered bias
rather than a European-centered one. This reflects a general trend of Atlantic
studies that was first developed by Americanists, as the American continent was

the most transformed by Atlantic dynamics. It is therefore not surprising that the
two alternatives to Atlantic history are continental history (of North America) and
hemispheric history (of the Western Hemisphere), which do not directly concern
Europe or Africa.62 In the book, this American-centered bias first appears in the
systems themselves: Eltis, “Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade”; Christopher Leslie
Brown, “Slavery and Antislavery, 1760-1820,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic
World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2011), 602-17. Another chapter raises the questions of workforce control and
the labor market from the crucial angle of migration: William O’Reilly, “Movements of
People in the Atlantic World, 1450-1850,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World,
1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), 305-23.
60. Sylvia Frey, “Beyond Borders: Revisiting Atlantic History” (unpublished paper presen-
ted at an international workshop on Louisiana and the Atlantic world in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, EHESS/Tulane University, October 2007 and April 2008).
61. On the two slave trades, see Eltis, “Africa, Slavery, and the Slave Trade.” On the
spatial dimension of the indigenous experience and interactions between Indians and
Europeans, see Bushnell, “Indigenous America.”
62. On hemispheric history, see Jack P. Greene, “Comparing Early Modern Worlds:
Some Reflections on the Promise of a Hemispheric Perspective,” History Compass 1-1
(2003), http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/full/10.1111/1478-0542.026; Jack P. Greene,
“Hemispheric History and Atlantic History,” in Atlantic History: A Critical Appraisal, eds.
Jack P. Greene and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 299-315.
296 See also: Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine, eds., Hemispheric American Studies

ATLANTIC HISTORY
chapters on the national Atlantics. While some mention slave trading outposts
and colonial territories (mainly in Angola) in Africa, most focus on the American
colonies and almost completely neglect the metropolitan societies.63 This is a far
cry from the new imperial history, which holds that empires are not only political
entities but also dynamic social and cultural formations, highlighting the “tensions
of empire”64 or the dialectical relations and reciprocal influences between the
metropolis and the colonies. As a result, a number of fine studies have emerged,
which examine how metropolitan societies were transformed by their inclusion
in imperial formations.65 This also differs from Morgan’s original approach in an
important article comparing the slave systems within the British Empire, which
maintained that metropolitan society was a “society with slaves” comparable to
some American societies.66 This may seem all the more surprising given that young
historians who list their research in both imperial and Atlantic studies have begun
producing exciting work on metropolitan societies in an Atlantic perspective.67
Similarly, though Morgan and Greene proclaim in their introduction that “in
the realm of Revolutionary ideas, the urgent requirement is to connect all sides
of the Atlantic,”68 the Atlantic revolutions are not considered together in the same
chapter. Aside from the American Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the popular
movements in Brazil, and those of the Hispanic world, not a single essay is dedicated
to either the English69 or the French70 Revolutions. The emphasis is therefore
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008); Eric Hinderaker and Rebecca Horn,
“Territorial Crossings: Histories and Historiographies of the Early Americas,” The

William and Mary Quarterly 67-3 (2010): 395-432.
63. The chapters on the French Atlantic in both books present a rare exception: Dubois,
“The French Atlantic”; Silvia Marzagalli, “The French Atlantic World.” It is perhaps
explained by the ongoing debate in France on the integration of national history and
colonial history.
64. Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper, eds., Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures
in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
65. Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination,
1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New
Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660-1840
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose,
eds., At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006).
66. Philip D. Morgan, “British Encounters with Africans and African-Americans, circa
1600-1780,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire,
eds. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1991), 157-219.
67. Catherine A. Molineux, Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial
Britain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
68. Morgan and Greene, “Introduction,” 16.
69. On the English Revolutions, see: Carla Gardner Pestana, The English Atlantic in an
Age of Revolution, 1640-1661 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004); Steven C.A.
Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
70. However, David Geggus’s chapter on “The Atlantic Revolution in Atlantic Perspec-
tive” (in Canny and Morgan, 533-49) raises the question of the complex relations
between the French and Haitian Revolutions. 297

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not placed on Atlantic revolutions, but rather on American independence move-

ments. That is perhaps why, despite Morgan’s obvious interest in the Caribbean
region reflected in the introductions to both volumes,71 the centrality of the West
Indies—particularly in the British and French empires—is not highlighted in the
Handbook: aside from Santo Domingo/Haiti, the Caribbean obtained independence
long after the continental colonies; indeed, some islands still remain under European
sovereignty today.
The final section in which these chapters are inserted, entitled “Disintegra-
tion,” raises the highly debated question of the chronology of Atlantic history. The
question is fundamental because the answer is closely tied to how the Atlantic
world is conceptualized. Discussions focus on the terminal end. Atlanticists have
long emphasized that the majority of American colonies gained independence
before the end of the 1820s. Nevertheless, this choice is increasingly questioned.
In the final essay of the book, Emma Rothschild retains the same date, but in
relation to the climax of the Atlantic slave trade in 1829,72 while a growing number
of historians defend the final measures to abolish slavery at the end of the nine-
teenth century.73 While all of these events relate to the end of colonial rule, they
favor the view of either white elites or subalterns: on the one hand, they focus on
the external dimension and the relationship between the metropolis and the colo-
nies (the question of empire), and, on the other hand, the emphasis is on the
internal dimension and the exploitation of non-European populations (the issue
of slavery and, more generally, forced labor). They also both adopt an American-
centered perspective: while these events of course had an impact on Africa and

Europe, they concerned first and foremost the Americas. As Games has highlighted,
it is in fact impossible to find an end date that is significant for the whole of the
Atlantic World.74
71. Greene and Morgan, “Introduction,” 13; Canny and Morgan, “Introduction,” 9-10.
72. Emma Rothschild, “Late Atlantic History,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic
World, 1450-1850, eds. Nicholas Canny and Philip D. Morgan (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2011), 634-48.
73. J. R. McNeil, “The End of the Old Atlantic World: America, Africa, Europe, 1770-
1888,” in Atlantic American Societies: From Colombus Through Abolition, 1492 to 1888, eds.
Alan L. Karras and John Robert McNeil (London: Routledge, 1992), 245-68; Aaron
Spencer Fogleman, “The Transformation of the Atlantic World, 1776-1867,” Atlantic
Studies: Literary, Cultural and Historical perspectives 6-1 (2009): 5-28; James E. Sanders,
“Atlantic Republicanism in Nineteenth-Century Columbia: Spanish America’s Chal-
lenge to the Contours of Atlantic History,” Journal of World History 20-1 (2009): 131-
50; and Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century
South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75-3 (2009): 627-50. For
authors who advocate a more extended timeline, see: Gabaccia, “A Long Atlantic in
the Wider World”; Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, The Atlantic in Global History; and
Toyin Falola and Kevin D. Roberts, eds., The Atlantic World, 1450-2000 (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2008).
298 74. Games, “Atlantic History,” 747 and 751-52.

ATLANTIC HISTORY
It must be recognized that Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans found them-
selves holding very different positions and playing a variety of roles within the
Atlantic world and that the Atlantic dynamics did not have the same consequences
in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It thus seems impossible to propose a single
narrative for the whole Atlantic world without confusing it with its American shores.
This proposal would amount to forcibly imposing a common narrative upon a
totality that did not really exist, instead of highlighting how the histories of differ-
ent parts of the Atlantic world were closely related without being confused.75
Rather than this comprehensive history of the Atlantic world, it seems necessary
to write one or more histories connected within and beyond the Atlantic world.76
In so doing, the risk of reifying the Atlantic framework could be avoided. This
approach would also allow practicing as much comparative history as transversal
history or even varying scales of analysis according to the subject of study and thus
reconciling Atlantic history with imperial, hemispheric or world histories.77
Refusing to write a single history of the Atlantic world does not mean aban-
doning the Atlantic perspective. It is important to continue to practice Atlantic
history because, as Subrahmanyam has emphasized in the context of the Portuguese
and Spanish empires, “the Asian and Atlantic experiences of the Iberian empires,
while not entirely separate and subject to interesting experiments of cross-fertilization,
cannot be treated entirely in similar terms.”78 The specificity of the Atlantic experi-
ence rests on the conjunction of several substantial historical phenomena of which
the cross-cutting effects could not be found anywhere else at the time: European
imperialism, the massive and intertwined transatlantic migrations of Europeans

and Africans (free in the first case and forced in the second), the formation of settler
colonies, and the systematic use of all forms of forced labor. Accordingly, the
“encounter” between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans did not happen
merely on the margins of European, African or Indian societies, but also gave rise
to the formation of multiethnic societies in the “New World” where Europeans,
Native Americans, and Africans lived together. This singular situation in turn had
important effects on the societies of the “Old World.” The racialization of societies
on both sides of the Atlantic and the construction of the colonial character of
European empires between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries can only be
understood by taking this singularity of the Atlantic experience into account.
75. For a similar perspective in an imperial framework, see Susan Dwyer Amussen,
Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 11.
76. This game of prepositions (of, around, within, beyond) is far from unusual. From
the beginning, Atlanticists have discussed different types of Atlantic history in this way.
See Games, “Atlantic History,” 745; Greene and Morgan, “Introduction,” 10.
77. Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,”
Geographical Review 89-2 (1999): 215-24.
78. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories
of the Iberian Overseas Empires, 1500-1640,” American Historical Review 112-5 (2007):
1383. 299

CÉCILE VIDAL
When the illegal slave trade ceased and the last slave systems were abolished at
the end of the nineteenth century, the circulations and connections within the
Atlantic world did not stop. If indeed the metaphor of the game is suitable to
describe the continual creation and destruction of communities described by John
Elliott, what did come to an end was this three-band billiards game, which was
already threatened in the nineteenth century by the arrival of an Asian workforce.79
While the relationships between Europe and the Americas, Africa and the Americas
as well as Europe and Africa endured, there were no concurrent relationships
between Europe, Africa, and the Americas that connected them inextricably.
At the same time, exchange with and circulation throughout the rest of the world
gained a new degree of importance.
Though this essay concludes with a “critical appraisal,” that is to say a critical
evaluation of the structuring, of the Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World by
Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, on the same tone as the Atlantic History by Jack
Greene and Philip Morgan, the intention is not to minimize the considerable work,
the quality of the essays, and the innovative perspectives offered by these two
volumes. The reflection and the discussions they are sure to generate are the sign
of their undeniable interest and remarkable richness.
Cécile Vidal
EHESS, MASCIPO - UMR 8168 (CNRS/EHESS)
300 79. Elliott, “Afterword,” 239.

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For a Comprehensive History of the Atlantic World or

Histories Connected In and Beyond the Atlantic World?

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Article available online at

Electronic distribution Cairn.info for Editions de l’E.H.E.S.S..

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Annales HSS 67, no. 2 (April-June 2012): 279–300.

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Assessing a Generation of Atlantic Studies

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Which Atlantic History?

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21. John H. Elliott, “Afterword: Atlantic History: A Circumnavigation,” in The British

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Atlanticists may therefore be tempted to favor a “mobile” and “connective”

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circulation—with this hyper-mobility even being celebrated, which may seem

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37. Trevor Burnard, “Review: Empire Matters? The Historiography of Imperialism in

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The Impossible Panoptic Vision of the Atlantic World

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which historians have applied to these Europeanized elements in African societies

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Africans. Elizabeth Mancke’s stimulating essay on the (trans)formations of political

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not placed on Atlantic revolutions, but rather on American independence move-

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300 79. Elliott, “Afterword,” 239.

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