Cast Your Votes: An English Atlantic? An Age of Revolution?

Carla Gardina Pestana. The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. xiii + 342 pp. Map, appendices, notes, and index. $49.95.

In November 2001, I attended a small conference of seventeenth-century historians hosted by the University of Chicago. The conference was called "England's Age of Revolution?" and the question mark in the title was taken very seriously by all involved. At the end of two days, one of the participants toted up the score—with all nuance and ambiguity duly acknowledged, how many papers suggested that yes, it was an age of revolution, how many said no? The result, if I remember correctly, was thirteen for revolution, nine against, with one paper deemed to be an abstention. I may be misremembering the 13-9 score, but I'm sure about the one abstention, because I was the one. Mine was the sole paper to address "the colonies" in a group otherwise devoted to the tumultuous events that shook the Three Kingdoms in the Stuart era. The things I perceived as signs of rapid, transformative change in colonial America—contact and conflict among alien racial groups, demographic catastrophes, the transition from subsistence to staple-producing export economies, and the rise of Atlantic commercial connections—had very little to do with the issues addressed by the rest of the papers. The other scholars brought innovative research and new ways of thinking about revolution to a variety of subjects, some traditional, some newly emerging, but all framed within a fairly confined English, or at most British, context.

Carla Gardina Pestana's new book, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661, attempts to bridge this chasm in the scholarship that divides historians of the British archipelago from those of England's American colonies. Through heroic efforts to plumb archives in England, North America, and the Caribbean, and through equally impressive synthetic reading of a generation's scholarship in British and colonial American history, Pestana has attempted to draw together the disparate developments in England's far-flung western colonies, from Newfoundland to Surinam, and to analyze them in the context of the revolutionary upheavals that rocked the British Isles during the era of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. The elements that make up this large and sprawling story have all been addressed before in various articles, dissertations, and monographs. But no one has attempted to synthesize this material since Charles McLean Andrews published the first two volumes of his magisterial series on The Colonial Period of American History in the mid-1930s.

Since Andrews's time, ideas about the nature and scope of revolutions have themselves gone through several revolutions, and the concept of Atlantic history has emerged as a new way to think about relationships among the regions around the Atlantic rim linked by European colonization and conquest. Pestana's book attempts to construct an important scholarly juncture, a site where these two complex strands of inquiry might intersect. Its agenda, then, is doubly ambitious, requiring an extensive source base as well as the conceptual sophistication necessary to make an important intervention in two rich scholarly fields. To say that it fails to do all of these things equally well is not to say that it fails. Rather, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution succeeds by showing us how challenging the task will be of aligning traditional national or imperial histories with the concept of Atlantic history, by demonstrating the breadth and depth of sources available that make this alignment possible, and by organizing materials and framing questions that future scholarship will need to address.

A subject this large requires definitions, and Pestana provides them in an introductory chapter that attends to the recent historiography of her two key terms and stakes out her ground. Pestana sees the "English Atlantic" as one among many possible early modern Atlantic worlds. By...