Only Connect: The Rise and Rise (and Fall?) of Atlantic History

July/August 2006 Historically Speaking 19 eral-purpose technologies necessary to sustain rates of productivity and economic growth comparable to those achieved during the early post-World War II decades and again during the information technology bubble that began in the early 1990s. I have also argued that the defense efforts and wars in which we have been engaged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries —and in which we are likely to be engaged for the next several decades—are unlikely to induce the development of new general-purpose technologies. The ability of the United States to sustain rapid productivity and economic growth in the future will require the design and implementation of civil institutions capable of mobilizing the necessary scientific, technical, and financial resources. As of yet, however, the United States has demonstrated little capacity to mobilize and direct public resources for the generation of new commercial general-purpose technologies . Unless it does so, I am forced to conclude that when the history of American technology development in the next several decades is eventually written, it will be written in the context of slower productivity and economic growth than the relativelyhigh rates that prevailed in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s and during the productivity bubble that began during the early 1990s. Vernon W. Ruttan is RegentsProfessorEmeritus in the departmentof appliedeconomicsandin the department of economics, andadjunctprofessorin the HubertH HumphreyInstitute of PublicAffairs, University of Minnesota. He is the authorofIs War Necessary for Economic Growth? Military Procurement and Technology Development (Oxford University Press, 2006). He has been electedaYellowof the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Saences and to membership in the NationalAcademy of Sciences. 1 Waldemar W Kaempffert, "War and Technology," AmericanJournalof Sociology 46 (1941): 431-444. 2 Nathan Rosenberg, Technology andAmerican Economic Growth (Harper and Row, 1972); Merritt Roe Smith, Harpers FerryArmory andtheNew Technology (Cornell University Press, 1977). '' ThomasJ. Misa, "Military Needs, Commercial Realities and the Development of the Transistor, 1948-1958," in Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and TechnologicalChange: Perspectives on the American Experience (MIT Press, 1966), 253-288. ' For the best single account of the development of the Internet see Thomas P. Hughes, RescuingPrometheus (Pantheon, 1998). Only Connect: The Rise and Rise (and Fall?) of Atlantic History Trevor Burnard Stocks in Atlantic history are high. "We are all Atlanticists now," declares David Armitage with blithe disregard for the perils of hubris. The topic has developed the type of institutional apparatus that signals it is more than a passing fancy. Courses on "The Atlantic World" abound; positions in Atlantic history have been advertised at an increasing number of institutions; and postgraduate programs for Atlantic history specialists are now appearing . Atlantic historians gather at conferences at exotic locations around the world; research centers with an Atlantic focus are created every year; and funding opportunities to do Atlantic history are becoming more frequent. Perhaps most telling, major universities , research libraries, and scholarly organizations have begun to treat Atlantic history as a subfield, making it possible for a cadre of historians to advance their careers, meet lots of agreeable people who share their own predilections in interesting and stimulating places, and network through joint participation in seminars and fellowships. The Atlantic way allows budding historians a multitude of new research and job opportunities . This is a remarkable turnabout, considering the dim prospects facing English-speaking historians of the early modern era in the late 1970s. Waterfront view of Bridgetown, Barbados, 1695. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number LCUSZ62 -1 24469]. For a graduate student in early American history, topics and areas that had previously been at the cutting edge of scholarship were now passé. The scholarship of the 1960s and 1970s led away from a broadening vision. The work of scholars influenced by the Annales school was extraordinary , ushering in a golden age of scholarship. But a major failure of social history in all its multitudinous varieties was a loss of focus. Historians concentrated so intently on the details of small-scale communities that, as Bernard Bailyn put it in an extremely influential 1982 jeremiad , previously "discrete and easily controllable" fields of knowledge had become "boundless" and "incomprehensible," the "wider boundaries" unclear. Historians coming into graduate...