Atlantic Bricolages

What does the bricoleur do? The Robert-Collins French-English Dictionary translates the term as “do-it-yourselfer” or “handyman,” but this rendering misses more than it captures. Bricolage can be repair work, like fixing up a classic Deux Chevaux buggy, but it can also describe acts of pure creation: tinkering up a new toy or a time-saving device. Whether fixing or fashioning, though, a bricoleur at his best is a small-scale genius. A skillful amateur, inventive and resourceful, he encounters the broken things of the world and makes them new.

The two books under review here examine how some master bricoleurs of the early modern Atlantic plied their craft. The Princeton Companion to Atlantic History and Revolutions without Borders are both attempts to make sense of the fragmented world that historians of the Atlantic have created over the past two generations. As scholars in the field have turned their eyes to wider vistas, they have recovered long-hidden connections among places, peoples, and events around the ocean. Evidence and argument in many projects now stretch across huge distances and diverse populations. To understand the politics of colonial elites in American cities, for instance, scholars are now just as likely to look to the Caribbean or the heart of the North American continent as they are to consider local contexts or British influences. Such capaciousness is a great strength of the field, but it can also be a curse by making it hard to delimit topics and assemble coherent bodies of evidence.

The Princeton Companion announces itself from the outset as a work of scholarly bricolage rather than a neat synthesis of existing knowledge or a new grand narrative. The editors write that their goal is to create a “suitably compound presentation of an inherently composite subject” (p. viii). This is reflected on the macro level in the book’s two-part structure. Part one offers five essays: a prologue and four chronological pieces that each cover a century. Together these offer one of the better brief accounts of the Atlantic world’s secular rise over a 400-year period. The four authors, each of whom is also an editor, emphasize the “core processes,” largely economic, by which “four continents had become an integrated historical space” during that time (p. 47).

Part two is made up of discrete thematic essays on a wide variety of topics that the editors deemed “analytically significant for the historical dynamics of the Atlantic World” (p. x). Reading it through is like admiring a deftly executed but idiosyncratic mosaic. You can see how the scholarly preoccupations of the five editors, all leading practitioners in the field, converged and split as they commissioned the essays. You will likely find yourself surprised by some of the field’s hidden gems that they have polished up and set in a prominent spot. A good example is the entry on the deity Mami Wata.

The individual topical essays offer consistently useful introductions to the subjects that the editors and authors chose to cover. The most revelatory ones, including pieces on capitalism (by Mark Peterson), modernity (Elizabeth Mancke), and sovereignty (Philip J. Stern), tackle key concepts for the field in crisp prose. Mancke’s entry on Modernity, for instance, begins: “In human terms the Atlantic Ocean is intrinsically modern, a vast maritime space that has been routinely crossed only in the last five centuries” (p. 340). In less than twenty-five words, she implicitly defines modernity and deftly situates the Atlantic within it. These pieces make the case for the world-historical significance of the early modern Atlantic while also sketching out guides to the field’s bedrock concepts.

The bricoleur’s strategy on display in part two...