Introduction to Atlantic History

historiography

methodology

I. units of analysis
Joan Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?" AHR 91, 4 (1986) [link]

the nation state

early modern British historians
historians of the British Empire
colonial American historians

oceans as barriers


II.  alternatives to the nation state

historical geography: the study of the intricate relationship between space and time

III. connective forces

markets and commerce
political systems
communications infrastructure
warfare
migrating communities and groups
languages
religions
institutions
ideas

IV.  the birth of Atlantic history

traditional approaches: slave trade, migration, empires

historians' splendid isolation

Atlantic history

     the scene of a vast interaction rather than merely the transfer of Europeans onto American shores.  Instead of a European discovery of a new world, we might better consider it as a sudden and harsh  encounter between two old worlds that transformed both and integrated them into a single New World.  Our focus is upon the creation of new human geographies resulting from this interaction, and that means those developing not only westward upon the body of America but eastward upon the body of Europe, and inward upon and laterally along the body of Africa.  For it is certain that the geography of each was changed: radically on the American side. . . more subtly on the European  side, with new movements of people, goods, capital, and information flowing through an established spatial system and slowly altering its proportions and directions;  slowly and unevenly on the African side, making connections with existing commercial systems but eventually grotesquely altering the scale and meaning of old institutions (Meinig, Atlantic America (1986), 4, 65).

conferences and working groups [Harvard Atlantic History Seminar]

Atlantic Studies

graduate degrees [UF]

academic positions [h-net]

Oxford Bibliographies Online: Atlantic history

“That the Atlantic from the fifteenth century to the present has been more than just an ocean, that it has also been a particular zone of exchange and interchange, circulation and transmission, is not only true, in the sense that these exchanges and interchanges shaped life on four continents for a very long period of time. It is also a conceptual leap forward, allowing historians to make links among places, peoples, and period that enrich our understanding of how societies were formed." (Trevor Burnard in Greene and Morgan, Atlantic History, 111)