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Reviews in American History 30.3 (2002) 381-388



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The American Revolution in the Atlantic World

Seth Cotlar


Stephen Conway. The British Isles and the War of American Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xii + 407 pp. Figures, maps, bibliography, and index. $90.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).
Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy. An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. xviii + 357 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $55.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).

It is a sign of the Atlantic World paradigm's maturation that Stephen Conway and Andrew O'Shaughnessy's books—the first about Great Britain and the second about the West Indies—are being reviewed in a journal devoted, in nomenclature at least, to American history. And it is also a sign of the state of American historiography that one would be hard pressed to find a book about the revolution on the mainland to review alongside them. Indeed, these two books rest at the intersection of two historiographical traditions, one that has been on the wane for the past decade and one that has been on the ascendancy. As commentaries on the causes and/or consequences of the American Revolution, these texts enter into a field of debate that has laid largely fallow since the 1992 publication of Gordon Wood's Pulitzer-Prize winning Radicalism of the American Revolution. 1 As interpreters of the revolution's Atlantic dimensions, however, Conway and O'Shaughnessy join a large and growing number of scholars interested in telling stories that extend beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. It remains to be seen whether these early forays into the Atlantic history of the American Revolution can raise enough new questions to draw the attention of more American historians back to the moment of imperial separation and national beginning.

Let's imagine a Rip van American Historian who fell asleep in 1990 and woke up yesterday. Probably the first thing he or she would notice is that the study of American history has gone global. To catch up on the latest developments, Rip might go to the OAH's website (that is, once he or she figured out what a world-wide website was and how one used it) where he or she would undoubtedly stumble upon the La Pietra report on internationalizing the [End Page 381] study of American history. In search of venues to present new work in American history, Rip would see announcements for numerous conferences with the word Atlantic in their title, from Harvard's annual Atlantic World seminar headed up by Bernard Bailyn (a familiar name to Rip) to the Omohundro Institute's upcoming conference on Virginia in the Atlantic World. Being the cynical type, Rip might conclude that the proponents of global capitalism had finally conquered the Ivory Tower (even Harvard and the publishers of the William and Mary Quarterly!), remaking the world of historical inquiry in their own image. The nation-state has become increasingly irrelevant in the age of globalization, Rip laments, and now even historians who should know better have been seduced into treating national boundaries as if they were flimsy, imaginary constructions to be transcended rather than taken seriously. Will this internationalizing trend go so far as to render national histories as obsolete as the mercantilist state?

Luckily, Rip's pessimism is unfounded. O'Shaughnessy and Conway's books illustrate how an Atlantic-wide lens can bring into focus aspects of national histories that would have otherwise gone unnoticed. David Armitage, one of the leading proponents of the new Atlantic history, has delineated three different varieties of Atlantic history, all of which seek to integrate national and international histories rather than replace the former with the latter. O'Shaughnessy's study of the West Indies is what Armitage would label a "trans-Atlantic" history, or one that generates compelling comparisons between different regions of the Atlantic world. Indeed, it does not get more compelling than O'Shaughnessy's opening salvo: "The thirteen colonies in North America represented only half the colonies of...

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