Historians disagree
Historians Disagree: Atlantic World History
How have historians studied the circulation of people, cultures, politics, knowledge, and trade around the Atlantic Ocean region?
by Elise A. Mitchell, Swarthmore College
In the twentieth century, historians created the field of Atlantic World history to address the intertwined histories of Africa, Europe, North and South America, and the Caribbean between roughly the mid-fifteenth century and the close of the nineteenth century. Atlantic World history approaches deemphasize geopolitical borders and national histories to acknowledge the circulation of people, cultures, politics, knowledge, and trade around the Atlantic Ocean region. Rather than chronicling the prehistory and development of nation-states, Atlantic World histories emphasize the connections between and transformations of peoples and societies around the Atlantic over time.
Atlantic history is a relatively new historical field that has been driven and shaped by many forces. We see its roots as early as the turn of the twentieth century among scholars of the African diaspora seeking to establish the links between African and African diasporic cultures around the Atlantic. A range of mid-twentieth-century freedom movements (Pan-Africanism, Black independence movements in Africa and the Caribbean, and Black civil rights movements in the United States and wider Americas) prompted scholars to consider approaches to African and African diasporic history that recognized the intertwined social, cultural, and political histories of people of African descent. Atlantic history also emerged from post–World War II popular and political writings by intellectuals and politicians calling for an Atlantic community, a concept later taken up by scholars and historians. Within academic institutions, Atlantic history begins with its establishment as a distinct field of study in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University in the 1960s and subsequently in Harvard’s International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World in the 1990s. In the ’90s, Paul Gilroy coined the term the “Black Atlantic” to highlight the connections between people of African descent in the Americas and Europe, focusing on the English-speaking diaspora. Thus, Atlantic World history emerged from these multiple roots. By the turn of the twenty-first century, historians acknowledged it as a well-established field.
Atlantic history can help us grapple with the histories, cultures, contexts, economies, politics, and environments that shaped people in the past by examining the connections and relationships between and among people in and around the Atlantic Ocean. Atlantic approaches have been profoundly helpful for historians studying the transatlantic slave trade, maritime history, trade, the abolition of slavery, the circulation of knowledge, and the age of revolutions. Atlantic approaches push us to think beyond geographic and political borders to recognize the historical links between places as geographically separate as Haiti and France, New York and Holland, Jamaica and Nova Scotia, Brazil and Angola, and Louisiana, France, Spain, and Senegambia.
There are many ways to approach Atlantic history. The historian David Armitage has identified three categories of Atlantic history scholarship: circum-Atlantic history, trans-Atlantic history, and cis-Atlantic history. Circum-Atlantic history is a transnational history of the Atlantic world that focuses on exchange, circulation, and transformations facilitated by European navigation. Studies that emphasize the production and circulation of particular goods (such as sugar, tobacco, indigo, rice, cotton, and alcohol) fall into this category. Histories of the migration of people do as well, and historians have used a circum-Atlantic framework to investigate the forced migration of enslaved Africans ensnared in the transatlantic slave trade as well as the migrations of European religious minorities and the defensive and forced mass movements of Native Americans throughout the Americas. Trans-Atlantic history is an international, sometimes comparative, approach to studying multiple places in the Atlantic World, such as the spread of revolutionary politics throughout the Atlantic World in the context of the American, French, Haitian, and Bolivarian revolutions. Cis-Atlantic history is the study of particular places in the Atlantic World, focusing on their connectedness to the wider region. For example, a historian writing a cis-Atlantic study of eighteenth-century Charleston, South Carolina, would highlight the port’s ties to the Caribbean, Britain, and West Africa. These threads of inquiry, and many more, weave together the patchwork fabric that constitutes Atlantic history.
These categories do not represent all approaches to Atlantic World history and are based on a Eurocentric conceptualization of the Atlantic World. Historians of the Black Atlantic, in particular, offer alternatives. They examine the Atlantic World through the lens of people of African descent and their forced and free migrations throughout the Atlantic World. These frameworks center the social, political, cultural, and economic ties that linked the Atlantic World to West and West Central Africa. The historian Lara Putnam has advocated for studies of Black people in the Atlantic World that take a microhistory (focusing closely on an event, individual, or community) or collective biography approach. She argues that using the (often fragmentary) histories of a swath of people and groups will enable historians to piece together broader transcontinental histories.
These examples only provide glimpses of different historians’ approaches to this vast, unwieldy, and developing field of study. While many historians embrace the Atlantic as a framework, some have criticized it. Some have argued that it is too expansive in its coverage and prone to obscuring local contexts. Others have criticized it for not covering enough. Some scholars of Africa, the African diaspora, and Native Americans have objected that Atlantic historians recycle old Eurocentric and imperialist frameworks. Likewise, Atlantic approaches privilege Atlantic connections over Pacific ones, creating a distorted understanding of the Americas and ignoring the contributions of Asians and Asian Americans. Some historians have rightly criticized the field for prioritizing approaches that center the history of men without accounting for women’s and children’s perspectives. However, this is rapidly changing as numerous historians of women, gender, and childhood have published extensively about the Atlantic World in the last two decades. Nevertheless, despite their limitations, Atlantic historical approaches can still be valuable for understanding the entangled histories of Africa, the Americas, and Europe in the early modern period.
Additional Reading
Paul Cohen, “Was There an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the Limits of a Historiographical Concept,” History of European Ideas 34, no. 4 (2008): 388–410.
Alison Games, “Atlantic History: Definitions, Challenges, and Opportunities,” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006): 741–57.
Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” Slavery and Abolition 22, no. 1 (2001): 3.
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Deborah Gray White, “‘Yes,’ There Is a Black Atlantic,” Itinerario 23, no. 2 (July 1999): 127–40.