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  • Old World Persistence, New World Transformations, and the Making of the Atlantic World:A Review Essay
  • Trevor Burnard (bio)
John K. Thornton , A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2012)

Even those of us who have long advocated an Atlantic approach to studying the interactions between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans over the longue durée of the early modern period are amazed at and a little bit suspicious of its current success and popularity. Now, with colloquia and seminars everywhere, with books with Atlantic in the title ever increasing in frequency, and with textbooks and synthetical articles proclaiming either the virtues of an Atlantic approach or denouncing it for its various vices (usually North American-centrism), Atlantic history has very much come of age. It may even be a distinct field of study that incorporates in one loose grouping the disparate areas of early modern African, North American, Caribbean, and Latin American history. The publication of John Thornton's rich and rewarding survey of Atlantic history suggests that the field has indeed moved well past its beginning stages.

Thornton's book is much more than a synthesis of existing scholarship, although it does pull together some of the more controversial themes in Atlantic history. It is a magnificent achievement, but it is also to an extent a daunting one that illustrates some of the problems that Atlantic history is going to have as it moves past the heady days of early discovery into being an established field. Thornton is a prodigious scholar with an enormous capacity for absorbing material and a marvelous facility with languages. People often say that to do Atlantic history properly means being a skilled linguist. Thornton has mastered most significant European languages and a number of languages of Africa and the Americas to boot. This linguistic facility has enabled him to read extraordinarily widely in many languages and to eschew secondary sources and translations into English for primary sources. Whether it is feasible for new entrants into the field to have Thornton's skills as a historian, linguist, and anthropologist will be an issue of concern. The bar keeps on being raised, just as it was in econometric history a generation ago when that area was the fashion of choice for early modern historians. We can only speculate on whether Thornton's work will raise standards generally or encourage less proficient scholars to think of others ways of contributing to knowledge. Thornton is careful not to be dogmatic about what skills are needed to do Atlantic history properly, but if an aspiring entrant to the field needs multiple languages and a familiarity with several fields of scholarship in which there are enormous literatures, the barriers to entry are beginning to get rather large.

How Thornton wrote this book is revealing of how the digital revolution is starting to have major scholarly benefits, especially to scholars without inexhaustible funds. He found, as he describes in his preface, that he could access most of the sources he needed from Gallica, Google Books, and other websites. He could consult huge numbers of primary sources directly without taking expensive trips to large libraries. The method of composition has made for an especially fine book. His main points, made gently rather than dogmatically, are exemplified by a multitude of stories drawn directly from primary sources.

That this book began as teaching notes may be one reason for the care Thornton takes in showing with primary sources what he means every time he puts forward a claim. Consider the remarkable chapter on language in the Atlantic world, a chapter worth the price of the book. Thornton describes in a few pithy pages better than anyone else I have read how language change can take place in times of cultural ferment and what language change means for cultural interactions. He shows, conclusively, that the linguistic richness of the Atlantic world was greater at the beginning than at the end of the Atlantic period and that we can trace the gradual Europeanization of the Americas (and perhaps Africa) best through the ascension of European languages. He shows, in particular, that the transmission of African culture to the Americas...

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