Comparing Atlantic Histories

Several years ago, David Armitage proclaimed, slightly tongue-in-cheek, that “we are all Atlanticists now.” As Armitage would be the first to admit, the Atlantic label does not fit all Atlanticists equally well, nor would everyone who could be called an Atlanticist necessarily welcome being so designated.¹ Still, Atlantic history continues as an area of study. Perhaps the clearest indication of this vitality is the contention that has recently arisen over Atlantic history’s limits and divisions. Is Atlantic history inherently Euro-centric? Is it too wedded to national and imperial frameworks? In seeking to overcome a geography that relegates Africa to the margins and privileges histories of the north over histories of the south, are Atlantic historians better served by comparative or interconnected approaches?² And who, exactly, are the thinkers with the answers to such questions? Partha Chatterjee, Paul Gilroy, Marc Bloch, Alfred Crosby, Mary Louise Pratt, Homi Bhabha, and Carl Schmitt are among the many names that have been put forward of late. The sheer variety says it all.³

Given this extraordinary breadth and diversity, readers have good reason to welcome the three books under review here. As the two edited volumes, in particular, make clear, Atlantic history is increasingly well-established, becoming in the process “sufficiently mature and orderly,” as Peter Coclanis writes in Jack Greene and Philip Morgan’s volume, “to be allowed to sit with the interpretive grown ups.” As Coclanis notes, “sitting with the grown ups is not necessarily a bad thing” (p. 337), yet Atlantic history is hardly ossified. Six years ago, when David Armitage first proposed the tripartite formulation from which this review’s opening quote is taken, it made sense to give equal billing to comparative and transnational methods.⁴ From the evidence assembled here, the upper hand currently belongs to historians who stress connection, interaction, and entanglement, with comparative history occupying a distant second place.⁵ In their introduction, Greene and Morgan see the current emphasis on connected histories as a natural result of Atlantic history’s “early stage of development” (p. 10), and Greene uses his own contribution to argue for a “hemispheric” approach that can provide a comparative alternative to such integrative tendencies. Given the speed with which things have changed over the last decade or so, it would be foolhardy to predict where the prevailing winds will be blowing ten years hence.

So what, exactly, is Atlantic history? According to Greene and Morgan, both of whom have ties to the Johns Hopkins Atlantic history program — in Greene’s case, as one of the program’s founders—Atlantic history is less a unified field than an “analytical construct,” one that can be used to examine “some of the most important developments of the early modern era” (p. 3). As Joyce Chaplin makes clear in one of the volume’s more intriguing chapters, there is nothing new about this usage. With roots that stretch back to the eighteenth century, if not earlier, the Atlantic has long been what Chaplin calls an “actors’ category,” by which she means a category that contemporaries themselves used (p. 35). From the outset, however, the Atlantic was an unstable concept. Indeed, the modern definition of the Atlantic Ocean as a single body of water—as opposed to two (or more) oceans—only gained widespread acceptance during the middle decades of the eighteenth century and was initially only used by the English (pp. 43–45). In affirming the usefulness of the Atlantic as an “explicit category of historical analysis,” Atlantic...