Atlantic History’s Hundred Horizons
Before there was the Atlantic, or Atlantic history, there was a ‘complex of seas’, formed of many segmented and discontinuous Atlantics - even if they were not known by that name or placed in that frame.[290] There were no westward probes across the ocean until centuries after eastward-moving peoples had created pathways across the sea: to this extent, the history of the ocean’s becoming ‘the Atlantic’ must still start with Europe and with Europeans.
Until the fifteenth century, most navigation was coastal, leading to cartographies both mental and formal that resembled roadmaps more than navigational charts, much like early modern Japanese representations of a ‘small eastern sea’ rather than of an open Pacific Ocean.[291] The Norsemen who settled in what is now Newfoundland likely thought they were in Africa; Christopher Columbus probably went to his grave believing he had reached Asia. The waters they had crossed joined known parts of the world but did not display vast novel vistas; they would not appear on maps, or in European minds, until sixteenthcentury Spanish navigational manuals and Dutch cartography began to reveal the full extent of what stood between Europe and Africa on one side and the Americas on the other. Yet even then, what oceanographers now think of as ‘the’ Atlantic long remained divided into sub-oceanic regions, particularly along a north-south axis bisected by the Equator. Oceanic currents, such as the Gulf Stream - first mapped by Benjamin Franklin in the late 1760s, though undoubtedly familiar long before in sailors’ artisanal knowledge - created routes through the ocean that reinforced the distinctions.[292] At least until the early nineteenth century, denizens and historians of the ocean had to reckon with ‘both Atlantics’, as the pioneering hydrographer James Rennell termed them around 1830.[293] As late as the 1870s, the northern portion could still be called, in a reference work from the United States, ‘the Atlantic proper’, in contrast to the ‘Ethiopic’ sector, or South Atlantic.[294] ‘The Atlantic is crossed daily by steamers’, wrote the American oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury in 1861, ‘the Pacific not once a year.’[295]Until the late nineteenth century, then, there were at least two Atlantics.
Above the Equator, lay the ‘Mer du Nord’, the ‘North Sea’ or, as Britons called it, with their eyes turned towards North America, the ‘Western Ocean’. Beneath the Equator, there was a mostly separate oceanic system that emerged with voyaging back and forth between Africa and South America, particularly in the context of the trans-Atlantic slave trade: this was, variously, the ‘Oceanus Ethiopicum’, the ‘Mare Aethiopicum’,‘Oceano Australe’, ‘Oceano Meridionale’ or ‘Mare Magnum Australe’. The Afro-Latin Atlantic, with Brazil and Angola at its extremities, was the arena for the ‘longest and most intense forced migration of the modern era’, in which almost five million enslaved persons were transported westwards from Africa between 1556 and the end of the Brazilian slavetrade in 1850. As Luiz Felipe de Alencastro has persuasively argued, that mid-nineteenth-century moment marked a major watershed in Atlantic history by diminishing the significance of one maritime system - the South Atlantic Gyre in which currents and winds had determined routes of travel in the age of sail - at the point when steamships were liberating mariners and their vessels from the winds and allowed the northern and southern Atlantic systems to be more firmly sutured together.[296] It was not a coincidence that perhaps the greatest emancipated voice of the age, Frederick Douglass, proclaimed in 1852 that, ‘Oceans no longer divide, but link nations together. From Boston to London is now a holiday excursion. Space is comparatively annihilated. Thoughts expressed on one side of the Atlantic, are distinctly heard on the other.’[297] Douglass was no doubt thinking of ‘the Atlantic proper’, but his words increasingly described the Atlantic basin as a whole, north and south as well as east and west.
The emergence of this integrated Atlantic - post-emancipation, postcolonial, if not quite (or perhaps ever) post-imperial - made possible the imagination of larger Atlantic histories in the sense of historical accounts that took the Atlantic basin as their bailiwick.
Indeed, a narrative arising from this moment and constructed around the rise and fall of the slavetrade and the histories of slavery and emancipation, may be the most promising point of origin for Atlantic history itself. W. E. B. Du Bois’s The suppression of the African slave-trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896) is emblematic of this post-emancipation historiography, a history of the black Atlantic a century before the sociologist Paul Gilroy made the term fashionable while using Du Bois’s own concept of ‘double consciousness’ as a lens.[298] Du Bois’s was a study on an intercontinental scale over a longue duree of almost 250 years. Without his work, studies such as C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) or Eric Williams’s Capitalism and slavery (1944) would have been inconceivable. Nor might we have had the single greatest macroscope for viewing the Atlantic as a dynamic, destructive, circulatory system - the online TransAtlantic Slave Trade Database detailing nearly 36,000 voyages carrying as many as 12.5 million people across the ocean.[299] There was a black Atlantic history almost before there was any other Atlantic history, and it placed bondage and forced displacement of subaltern populations at the heart of the Atlantic story.As if to answer this black Atlantic vision, a distinctly white and racially charged Atlantic also emerged briefly in the early twentieth century. This was the geo-political vision of an Atlantic world imagined by the German political geographer Karl Haushofer in the 1920s. Haushofer is perhaps better known now for his vision of Pacific history - another early and anomalous precursor to a burgeoning field of oceanic history - but the two emerged in tandem in the pages of his journal, the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik.[300] There, the Atlantic world (Atlantische Welt) comprised the continents of the Americas, the oceans around them and only the subSaharan parts of Africa.
Haushofer clearly separated this from another sphere of influence with its own independent history and destiny, the ‘Old World’ (Alte Welt) of Europe, North Africa and the Arabian peninsula. This Atlantische Welt connected the Americas to Africa but not to Europe, and hence a racialised and creolised hemisphere with oceanic projections.[301] This was an Atlantic world outside of any Atlantic history that had been, or ever would be, imagined again.The next wave of Atlantic histories came during what, from an Atlantic perspective, was the inter-war period.[302] In the closing stages of the First World War, the American journalist Walter Lippmann began to write of an ‘Atlantic community’, which was initially North Atlantic in scope but which he later extended to include various Latin American countries. His idea went underground during an era of American isolationism but resurfaced later as the backstory for the institutionalised Atlantic community erected after the next great war. Lippmann emerged afresh as a promoter of Atlanticism as a species of internationalism in the era of US-led building of international institutions, from the Atlantic Charter (1941) and the United Nations to UNESCO to NATO, that is often held to be the seedbed for Atlantic history as an integrated field of focus.[303] It is from this moment that we get the initial conception of ‘Atlantic world’ as a geopolitical expression of an Atlantic community and as a historical entity in the writings of diplomats and legal internationalists but not yet among historians.[304] It was in the early 1970s that the idea of an ‘Atlantic world’ first broke free of these origins to migrate into broader historiography. It only became a widespread term of art in the new century, when its usage ballooned in historical work after 2000: six scholarly articles in the English used the term in their titles in the 1990s but over fifty did so in the 2000s, and there has been a similar pattern of invocations since 2010.[305]
The post-Second World War genealogy of Atlantic history underpinned a narrative with a durable chronology and implied geography.
European westward expansion into oceanic space led to waves of emigration premissed on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the destruction or transmutation of their communities in order to facilitate settler colonialism, initially under the supervision of European metropoles. The increasingly insatiable slave trade pumped expendable labour into a system of early capitalist production, leading to escalating inequality and racial domination. Those hierarchies did not collapse when perceived political oppression and the creole response to it sparked a series of ‘Atlantic revolutions’ that led to political independence, the formation of new nation-states (which were retrofitted with their own national histories) and, with a delay of decades and sometimes as a result of civil war, the emancipation of the enslaved. This was the teleological narrative that informed Atlantic history at the height of its fortunes in the early twenty- first century. It settled into a timeline between the late fifteenth century and the first third of the nineteenth century but inevitably missed the watershed of 1850 and the later Brazilian abolition of 1888 and only belatedly incorporated the Haitian Revolution as a pivotal event. It was, by accident or design, but still without acknowledgment, an Atlantic history whose chronology revealed its geography as still centred on that ‘proper’ Atlantic above the Equator.This was a history of the North Atlantic as the Mediterranean of modernity, strung between European expansion and early industrialisation and informed by a liberal story of oppression relieved by revolution and emancipation, both personal and political. In the hands of the French historian Jacques Godechot and his American collaborator, R. R. Palmer, this political narrative produced a history of modern Western civilisation with the Atlantic at its heart. However, the Atlantic itself was more a hole than a centre. Their germinal paper, ‘Le probleme de l’Atlantique’, presented in Rome in 1955, depicted an Atlantic world without an ocean: like Palmer’s great solo work, The age of the democratic revolution (1959-64), their piece can hardly be said to contribute to Atlantic history as an oceanic history, though Godechot himself had written the first maritime history of the Atlantic in French in 1947.[306] (The first English-language histories of the Atlantic, published in 1957 by two mariner-writers, the American Leonard Outhwaite and the Australian Alan Villiers, were popular works firmly focused on the North Atlantic.)[307] It would take students of the early modern Hispanic Atlantic inspired by Fernand Braudel in the 1950s, such as Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho, Huguette Chaunu and Pierre Chaunu and Frederic Mauro, to apply Mediterranean models to the Atlantic and its regions, even if Braudel himself found their work ‘arbitrary’ for failing to achieve his holistic ambitions.[308] As a result, these avatars of Atlantic history were rarely invoked later as originators of the field, in favour of dry-footed historians like Palmer who had little interest in the history of the Atlantic Ocean per se.
Until the explosion of self-consciously Atlantic history in the late 1990s and early 2000s, scholarship flowed largely in the channels cut after the Second World War. These intellectual conduits directed Atlantic history into imperial and national histories, within a chronology from encounter to emancipation between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The major exceptions were those African historians like Philip Curtin who followed Du Bois and his successors in studying the long-term dynamics of the slave trade: their work necessarily affirmed the established periodisation of Atlantic history, but it penetrated deeper into the South Atlantic context and into Africa, it integrated the Caribbean more firmly within Atlantic history and it focused on a slavesystem driven by national entities, in Portugal and Britain especially, but decidedly supranational and intercontinental in scope.[309]
The challenge for Atlantic history in the late twentieth century was threefold: first, to integrate the various streams of Atlantic history - political, economic and cultural; black and white Atlantics; national and transnational histories; second, to press against conventional chronological and geographical boundaries; and third, to define the identity of the field without cutting it off from other areas of historical inquiry. The rapid maturation and equally speedy dissolution of Atlantic history in the early 2000s only partly rose to those challenges. To be sure, as the proliferation of seminars and conferences, monographs and articles demonstrated, Atlantic history offered an expansively integrative approach at just the moment when historians were becoming increasingly sceptical that a national frame was adequate to capture the processes, both local and global, in which they were interested. The major syntheses that emerged in the wake of this expansion of monographic work, in the form of textbooks and surveys as Atlantic history became a widespread teaching field, consolidated this integrative tendency, especially by combining the black, white and ‘red’ (or Indigenous) Atlantics into multi-ethnic narratives.[310] They were less successful in breaching the apparently impenetrable barrier of the mid-nineteenth century: the moment when both Atlantics were finally joined into a single communications system continued to mark the outer limit of Atlantic history, at least chronologically. Historians of early globalisation centred on the late nineteenth-century Atlantic economy, students of the US Civil War era and scholars of migration who note the movement of sixty-five million Europeans across the ocean between 1830 and 1930, have made the case for a ‘long Atlantic’.[311] However, what Emma Rothschild calls ‘provincialism in time’ has proved more resilient than provincialism in space, and this longer Atlantic has yet to become established historiographically.[312]
The third challenge, of defining Atlantic history, remained productively unresolved even at the zenith of Atlantic history’s success. To establish its identity, some historians, like Bailyn, engaged in genealogy, to discover their ancestors and to display their pedigree, even if at some cost in constraining originality while affirming continuity. In response, others (including myself) turned to morphology, to display the family resemblances among related strains of Atlantic history.[313] These joint efforts may have briefly shaped the course of the field, just before its identity was once more subsumed into broader currents of historical inquiry. Sometimes, the best way to go forward is to look backwards; in the remainder of this chapter, I will suggest three new routes for Atlantic history, in light of recent oceanic history more broadly, and building on my earlier effort to dissect the field.