The Global Atlantic: 1400–1900 by Christoph Strobel (review)

This small book attempts to do something very significant to the field of Atlantic History as it has evolved over the last several decades. In many ways, it succeeds in its announced task, but in other ways the book doesn't really live up to its potential to redefine a field and challenge the status quo. Even so, it is an approachable book for students and is immensely readable. Its greatest contributions, however, reside in the field of Atlantic History, rather than in the field(s) of World or Global History.

The book, which is organized into four parts, consists of a synthesis as opposed to providing a showcase for original research. There is nothing wrong with this, since we need syntheses to understand where there is a gap in the narrative and, therefore, where there might be a need for further archival research. In this case as a result, the narrative operates throughout the book at a very high level, making it hard to discern what is actually new here and what has been distilled in order to make it comprehensible for its intended undergraduate student audience. The book contains an introduction and conclusion, as well as four chapters. The author envisions this as three distinct parts. The first, consisting of a single chapter, describes the state of affairs before 1492 in the three regions that border the Atlantic Ocean: Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It explains the ways in which intraregional interaction took place within both Afro-Eurasia and the Americas. It nicely sets up the ideas that none of these regions was completely isolated, though obviously transregional interactions in the Americas were not as widespread as they were on the other side of the Atlantic. And this section lays the groundwork for what is to come: the nature of the exchanges and interactions in this region expand and broaden as Europeans colonize the Americas and bring in Africans to repopulate the region after the tragic loss to disease of indigenous Americans.

The book's second part consists of three chapters—each of which tells part of a now familiar story of integration of the societies that border the Atlantic. What the author attempts to do in this section is connect the integration of the Atlantic World to an expanding global world. If the Americas were integrated with Africa and Europe in the Atlantic World then so was this Atlantic world integrated into an existing world system that spanned Afro-Eurasia. Chapter 2 provides a now traditional narrative about Atlantic integration while chapter 3 links that narrative to Spanish enterprises in the Pacific, using silver as a vehicle for doing so. The first part of this story tells an oft-overlooked tale of various African societies' participation in commercial activities beyond slavery and the slave trade, while the second part attempts to connect the Chinese, through silver, into expanding patterns of global commerce. This approach is refreshing, especially given the tendency of much Atlantic history now to be centered on the British colonies that would eventually become the United States.

The last chapter in this section attempts to connect all of this to an Indian Ocean "world," but it is much less developed and, as a result, less convincing. It is also Eurocentric, focusing on the Dutch and the VOC, as well as British and French efforts to intrude into this world. While an interesting story, making the case for the Indian Ocean would have required looking much more closely at those societies that "touched" the global, whether under European control or not. So while this is a very engaging idea, one with rich potential and whose time has come, it is not so well executed here and is therefore the book's least convincing chapter.

The book's conclusion attempts to move the chronology further into the nineteenth century by briefly touching on industrialization and the changes to the Atlantic with its global connections. The problem is that...