The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography

Two. Atlantic and Caribbean Perspectives: Analyzing a Hybrid and Entangled World

60 two Atlantic and Caribbean Perspectives: Analyzing a Hybrid and Entangled World Wim Klooster How has a thalassographic prism enabled new approaches in the historiography of the Atlantic world? In order to answer this question, I delve into the writing of Atlantic history since its coming of age in the last two decades. I distinguish five different ways to write Atlantic history: one school stresses agency, another adaptation, a third privileges comparisons , a fourth entanglement, and a fifth studies networks. But, for the sake of clarity, let me start with the question: What is Atlantic history? The most convenient definition is that of Sir John Elliott: Atlantic historians study “the creation, destruction, and re-creation of communities as a result of the movement, across and around the Atlantic basin, of people, commodities, cultural practices, and values.”1 This definition is perhaps erring a little on the cultural side, but it will do for now. What should be clear from the outset is that Atlantic historians do not gravitate to the microecological approach that Purcell and Horden favor for the Mediterranean .2 The Atlantic Ocean was obviously far too variegated for that. In his book, La Mediterrannée, Fernand Braudel noted the contrast between the “exhausting process of colonizing the New World carried out by the Iberians,” and “the facility with which the Mediterranean dweller traveled from port to port.” Mediterranean migration, he added, was not true transplantation, but merely removal, and the new occupant would feel quite at home in his new habitat.”3 In the French Atlantic alone, one historian writes, “the range in climate and topography must have been daunting to any eighteenth-century administrator, ranging from ice floes to equatorial rain forests, from rocky islets to humid swamps and tundra, Atlantic and Caribbean Perspectives 61 across two major oceanic wind and current systems and another halfdozen major regional subsystems.”4 The Atlantic world does have limits, however, not only geographically but temporally. The general (albeit not universal) agreement is that Atlanticists tackle the period between 1492 and circa 1830—these dates marking the start of Europe’s exploration and conquest of the Americas, and the completion of the process that dissolved the chief Atlantic empires. Prior to the recent popularity of Atlantic history, there had always been historians trying to come to terms with the Atlantic world. Yet this was historiography of another kind, not necessarily inferior, but with different foci. In times past, historians emphasized local, regional, and imperial institutions. Their Atlantic world was one with clear national divisions, with each colony closely tied to its mother country, even if autonomous developments in the colonies received increasing attention as the decolonization of Africa and Asia gained pace after World War II. They displayed scant interest in integration, networks, social history, trans-imperial comparisons, and actors across boundaries. Their Atlantic world was shaped by Europeans, with Native Americans and Africans at best reacting to European initiatives, but not actively creating their own destinies. The pioneers of Atlantic history, those who in the decades after World War II began to envisage a unified Atlantic world as a perspective , although not yet as a research field,5 saw it invariably as white and projected its location north of the equator. Their New World was usually synonymous with British North America. Nor did students of the South Atlantic offer an alternative. Specialists of colonial Latin American history were equally parochial—a comparative perspective was almost completely missing from the Cambridge History of Latin America, published in 1984.6 Much has changed in the last two decades. As it has spawned journals, book series, conferences, and PhD programs, Atlantic history has become ubiquitous in the process. Why do we study Atlantic history? One reason why Atlantic history has excited so much interest is that it breaks with precedent. It moves away from the study of nation-states and continents , replacing it with a broader horizon and a more integrated view of history. The makeover is not nearly complete. Much of what passes for Atlantic history is hardly different from colonial American history—a relabeling of older, currently less fashionable historiographies. The explanation , it would seem, is that the field was launched in the United States, at least in part, in an attempt to align the country’s history with the reality of a post-civil-rights-era nation. Privileging Pilgrims and Puritans in 62 The Sea the opening stages...